I've since updated the laptop to Ubuntu 7.04 and then immediately thereafter to Ubuntu 7.10 and nothing bad has happened. The web camera was getting closer to usable as I could see it in lsusb
binder@death:~$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 05e1:0501 Syntek Semiconductor Co., Ltd
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
binder@death:~$
and so knew it was a Syntek webcam. I did some browsing around and found recommendations to use the cutting edge Syntek driver via an Ubuntu forums thread and following those suggestions, I could see it recognized in dmesg:
[ 31.580000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 webcam driver startup
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 - STK-1135 based webcam found.
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Syntek AVStream USB2.0 1.3M WebCam - Product ID 0x0501.
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Release: 0005
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Number of interfaces : 1
[ 31.592000] stk11xx: Initialize USB2.0 Syntek Camera
[ 31.808000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 Camera is ready
[ 31.808000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 Camera is now controlling video device /dev/video0
[ 31.808000] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb_stk11xx_driver
[ 31.808000] stk11xx: v1.1.0 : Syntek USB Video Camera
So now I was nearly home. But I still needed to do one more thing to get it to go because when I tried to start Camorama it kept erroring out with:
Could not connect to video device (/dev/video0).
Please check connection.
And when I ran it from the command line with the -D switch, I got a touch more information:
binder@death:~$ camorama --debug
VIDIOCGCAP -- could not get camera capabilities, exiting.....
Which turned out to be resolved by the same thing that always fixes using multimedia devices in Linux: permissions. In this case, /dev/video0 existed, was owned by root:video and only had permissions for user and group. So I added my user account to group video with:
sudo adduser binder video
and all is right with the world.
