[ubuntu-uk] Sonix Webcam

[Tim Dobson]

Ken Adams wrote:
> Having a nightmare trying to get my webcam running.

Webcams *are* a nightmare, however, I was elated a few days ago when I 
found that my 8 pound, generic, bottom of the range, unbranded webcam,
a) works natively with amsn & kopete - seriously - these programs have 
AWESOME SUPPORT for webcams apparently.
b) works the same or better with a different driver installed as on windows.

I have no idea whether the details of how I got it working are helpful, 
but i'll try and shed some light.

the main problem I had was that I had no idea about the cameras model. 
nothing on it has any writing.
I pulled out the cd with the windows drivers on it and no-where were the 
ostentatiously. Eventually I located what i believed to be a model 
number of some sort whilst looking at the directory structure of the 
stff on the CD near the driver files.

I stuck this into google and go... well a few pictures of the webcam on 
the hong kong makers site[1] and 101 sites offering me the windows 
drivers to download.

with information about it's model number i googled it and things like 
"linux driver" to find pages of other people trying to get the webcam to 
work.[2][3]

however, at that point, I still couldn't see anything firm to go on.

I found articles on linux.com[4] which helped me verify using "dmesg | more"

I eventually found a post on ubuntuforums which at first glance was not 
useful at all[5] but on evaluating made sense.

there are *two* drivers that "work" with my webcam.

gspca and SN9C1xx

<starts pretending he is a l33t kernel hacker>

i ran "ls /proc/modules | grep *sn9*" to find the name of the SN9C1xx 
driver module. I then ran[6]

sudo rmmod old-driver-name

to "unload that driver"
and then installed and setup the new driver with:

sudo aptitude install gspca-source
sudo m-a auto-install gspca
sudo modprobe gspca

Whilst I was compiling the driver (the second step) I encountered an 
error. not knowing what to do, I ignored it. Apparently this has not 
done any harm.

through out the whole process I found google and the ubuntu forums 
invaluable resources and that generally I could find out things from 
googling product numbers, drivers etc.

I now have a fully functional webcam, which is extremely bad quality, 
tot he point of needing people to be in direct sunlight to start to show 
up in the picture ;)

The webcam is rubbish, but at least it works just as well as it does in 
windows.

I suggest that research about ones webcam is probably the best way to 
get it working. :)

I hope this will be of help to some-one though am all to aware that this 
is specific to the M6323 webcam and other generic webcams using the same 
chipset.

cheers

Tim


[1] 
http://www.mingjong.com.tw/eipe/front/bin/ptdetail.phtml?Category=100072&Part=M6323
[2] http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?showtopic=16876
[3] http://list.dprg.org/archive/2004-February/024583.html
[4] http://www.linux.com/feature/118896
[5] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=506539
[6] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=353718

-- 
www.tdobson.net
----
If each of us have one object, and we exchange them, then each of us
still has one object.
If each of us have one idea, and we exchange them, then each of us now
has two ideas.   -  George Bernard Shaw