Webcam trouble (Inglese)

My article about compiling and installing video4linux modules became relatively popular even abroad so i decided to rewrite it in english. So here we go.

What’s the purpose of this article? You’ve got a video4linux device(webcam, DVB card, etc.) but it doesn’t work so you are desperately searching a solution. The best thing one can do (and is the most simple one, instead of patching the drivers you’ve got) is to compile the latest development snapshot of video4linux prayoing and hoping that code relative to that device was added.

What do i need? You need kernel headers, mercurial, gcc related stuff and obviously gcc.
In *ubuntu and Debian that’s easy to get as a

sudo apt-get install build-essential mercurial linux-headers-`uname -r`

in the console.

First, we need a working directory.

mkdir ~/v4lhg
cd ~/v4lhg


Now we download the source from mercurial.

hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb

N: This can take a long time if your connection is slow.
The output should be like that:

destination directory: v4l-dvb
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 11446 changesets with 29260 changes to 1993 files
updating working directory
1429 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved


Ok now we can proceed with preparing the source for compiling.

cd v4l-dvb
cp /boot/config-`uname -r` v4l/.config

That step was necessary in order to acquire your kernel’s configuration so you can simply “make && make install” and get fresh modules.

make config

( or make oldconfig if you are sure that your kernel’s configuration has got the option relative to your hardware enabled. )
Now answer to the questions. It is a list of hardware that video4linux supports.
Next we’re going to compile

make

This will take some time depending on your computer’s CPU. Now we’ll install the modules.

sudo make install


~ di admiral0 su Aprile 11, 2009.