With my brother getting transferred to Singapore, we decided to get home a broad band connection (nothing but BSNL Data One), a web cam and a new headset.

I called up my schoolmate A. Mohemad Haaris who is a partner in Xeroxtronics at Mambalam and asked him to home deliver a webcam and a headset. After a few days, he sent me a fancy Zebronics ZEB -350WC web cam. It calls itself as a night vision web cam. Wonder what it really means. I tried connecting it to my PC. Initially, the camera was not detected either by M$ Window$ XP nor by the then Mandrake (now Mandriva) Linux 10.1.

Later in the evening, the camera started working under windows perfectly. But I cant risk my PC to connect to Internet through Windows. I had enough trouble of loosing my data to virus three times earlier. So, never will I connect my PC to internet through Windows. Who is going to pay for the resource hungry Anti Virus Softwares. I am simply fed up with Anti Virus software that has caused enough embarrassment in front of my clients, by slowing/hanging my PC. So somehow I have to get this camera running under Linux. Fine. How to do that?

A little Googling helped a lot. I am not going to elaborate on how I searched. But I guess, it will be very useful to list down the steps.

[root@localhost kumar]# lsusb
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0ac8:305b Z-Star Microelectronics Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Okay: my Camera is actually a Z-Star Microelectronics Corp. 305 Rev. B

A little more Googling and the screen shots in the user manual revealed that my camera has an alias name Vimicro Zc305B.

More Googling: a French website had just the right thing for my camera. A driver for Linux :-).

http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html

I then downloaded the source tar ball and followed the sequence of steps as described from the site

http://www.caprinae-ascendant.net/foss/linux-on-sager.php

For reference here it is again.

1. Downloaded Spca5xx driver source tar.gz to local. (spca5xx-20060101.tar.gz)

2. su to root (Root console in Konsole)

3. mv spca5xx*.gz /usr/src (move the tar.gz to /usr/src folder)

4. tar -zxvf spca*.tar.gz

5. cd spca5xx*

6. make (This will dump a few things on the screen)

7. make install (this will again dump something on the screen)

8. modprobe spca should do an auto-complete as modprobe spca5xx

9. vi /etc/X11/XF86Config

10. Search for -- Section “Module”

11. Add the line -- Load “v4l”

12. Re-start X Server.

13. Open Gnome Meeting and start chatting.

BUT BUT BUT.. , my web cam worked only when I login as root. This must be a simple “rights” issue. So I checked with “ ls /dev/vid*”. This revealed that /dev/video0 was not accessible by any one other than root. So I did a “chmod a+rwx /dev/vid*”. After this, the camera is working perfectly under any user....:-)

Another useful place to look at for checking the correct functionality is to tail “/var/log/messages”

Please do let me know if any of you have a similar experience................:-)