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Page Contents Author Introduction Notes Prerequisites Determining the driver to use Installing the latest Gspca driver Installing the latest Linux-uvc driver

Author

Bill Giannikos (bill2 at giannikos.com.au)
www.billgiannikos.com

Introduction

This guide will help you set up your webcam under SuSE and OpenSuSE 10.3. SuSE doesn't include the main drivers used by most webcams so we will be installing these drivers.

Most webcams are covered by either the Gspca or Linux-uvc driver, we will be covering both.

Notes

While this guide is mainly focused to laptop users there isn't any difference for desktop users.

Both the Gspca and Linux-uvc drivers are in a development stage. This means the drivers are not yet considered fully stable and should be installed with caution. This is especially true for the Linux-uvc driver as it is still listed as being in alpha stage.

Prerequisites

You should run a full update for your installation to ensure you have all the latest packages installed.

Determining the driver to use

In Linux there are 2 different drivers which covers the majority of webcams available, these are the Gspca or Linux-uvc driver. You will need to determine which is the correct driver to install. If you are not sure which webcam you have you can make use of the 'lspci' and 'lsusb' commands to print a list of devices on your system.

After determining your webcam type you need to see which driver supports your webcam. Here is a list of webcams supported by the Gspca driver and here is a list of webcams supported by the linux-uvc driver.

If you webcam doesn't appear on either list then it's possible your webcam isn't supported. If you like you can just try installing both drivers anyway and see how you go.

Installing the latest Gspca driver

In this section we will be detailing the procedure of installing the latest Gspca driver for SuSE-OpenSuSE 10.3.

1. Download the latest drivers from http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html. You want to download the latest gspcav1 driver, not the older spca5xx. In this guide we are going to use gspcav1-20071224 as at the time of writing these are the current ones.
2. Load up a terminal window if you are in the graphic interface.
3. Switch to the root user by entering the command "su -" (without the quotes) and typing in your root password.
4. Type in the following to install gcc and the kernel headers:

5. Move to the /usr/src/ folder with:

6. Extract the contents of the file you downloaded with:

Remember to replace the "/path/to" in this command to the path of where your file is and change the filename to the version you downloaded

7. Move into the newly created folder with

8. Now start the building process with:

This will take a while.

9. And finally we install the driver with:

10. Reboot your computer and the newer gspca driver will be used.

Installing the latest Linux-uvc driver

In this section we will be detailing the procedure of installing the latest Linux-uvc driver for SuSE-OpenSuSE 10.3.

1. Load up a terminal window if you are in the graphic interface.
2. Switch to the root user by entering the command "su -" (without the quotes) and typing in your root password.
3. Type in the following to install gcc, svn and the kernel headers:

4. Move to the /usr/src/ folder with:

5. Download the latest driver with:

6. Move into the newly created folder with

7. Now start the building process with:

This will take a while.

8. And finally we install the driver with:

9. Reboot your computer and the newer linux-uvc driver will be used.