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There are quite a lot of webcameras that can be made to work using the Ov51x-driver. Note that manual installation may not be needed for you, so please read [:Webcam:the general webcam page] and maybe try whether EasyCam works for you.

Preliminaries

This guide has been reported to work with a Hercules Classic Webcam is an el-chepo webcam incorporating 4LEDs for low lighting usage. "lsusb" sees the camera as "Omnivision Technologies, Inc". The drivers needed to make it work are the ov51x and ov519_decomp modules.

Assumed in this description is that your camera is seen on the USB bus, otherwise you have to activate and make sure that USB works properly by activating the bus.

Once the cam is seen on the USB bus, the following procedure gives you a fully functional cam on your machine.

Installation

Get linux headers

Get the linux headers for your system, so that you can compile the drivers once you downloaded them. To do this, open a terminal window (Applications -> Terminal on XUbuntu) and type

{{{sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-uname -r }}}

Get the modules

Get the modules for your webcam: {{{wget http://www.rastageeks.org/downloads/ov51x-jpeg/ov51x-jpeg-1.0.0.tar.gz }}}

Ensure the drivers landed into a directory you know...

Extract the drivers

Move to the directory where your downloaded drivers are, and extract the source files from the tar files.

{{{tar -xvf ov51x-jpeg-1.0.0.tar.gz }}}

and Change directory to where your sources are:

{{{cd ov51x-jpeg-1.0.0 }}}

Prepare the installation files