Revision of Setup a Webcam from Sun, 02/06/2011 - 07:03
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This manual is partially adapted from the Ubuntu community documentation, courtesy of the Ubuntu Documentation Team, licensed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike license.
Choosing a Webcam
Webcam support is mainly provided by the Linux UVC Project's UVC driver. It provides a universal driver in the same way that a generic driver handles USB storage devices (memory sticks, hard drives etc). When looking to purchase a webcam for use with Trisquel, you should look for a UVC compatible camera. The Linux-UVC project has a good list of UVC compatible webcams as well as The Quickcam Team for Logitech cameras.
Testing Your Webcam
Trisquel aims to provide "out-of-the-box" or "just-works" functionality for webcams; you should be able to plug in your webcam and use it right away. To test your webcam, start Cheese (Main Menu → Graphics → Cheese Webcam Booth), a GNOME program for capturing video and stills from a webcam and applying special effects. It uses the gstreamer library, which utilizes the video4linux2 API.
If the performance in Cheese is laggy, you can improve it by lowering the resolution (Edit → Preferences).
Identifying Your Webcam
To find your webcam model, open a terminal and enter the following:
lususb -vYou will see detailed information about the devices connected to the USB bus. If you scroll through it, you should find some information about your webcam.
