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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.

Credits

This guide is based on the [http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=2049256&postcount=14 forum post] by gentle_turtle. He based this posting on information earlier in the thread his post is part of and on [:this Ov51x-guide:http://blog.thedarkmere.net/index.ph...peg-guide.html].

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

1. 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 }}}

2. Get the modules

Get the modules for your webcam: {{{wget http://www.rastageeks.org/downloads/ov51x-jpeg/old-releases/ov51x-jpeg-0.5.4.tar.gz }}}

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

3. 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-0.5.4.tar.gz }}}

and Change directory to where your sources are:

{{{cd ov51x-jpeg-0.5.4 }}}

4. Compile

Compile and install the modules:

{{{sudo make install }}}

Note: if you are using Feisty, remove the lines referring to "linux/config.h" (#include <linux/config.h>) from all .c-files first! (else you will get an error witch prohibits you from continuing these instructions successfully.

If everything went succesful, this will compile the drivers and install them into the subdirectory of /lib/modules/your-linux-version called extra

5. Install

If all went well, we can install the modules by hand now:

{{{sudo modprobe videodev sudo modprobe i2c_core sudo insmod /lib/modules/uname -r/extra/ov51x.ko sudo insmod /lib/modules/uname -r/extra/ov519_decomp.ko}}}

To test your installation you can use any camera viewing application, such as xawtv.

Making modules permanent

Also this part is based on the [http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=2049256&postcount=14 forum post] by gentle_turtle. He based this posting on information earlier in the thread his post is part of and on [:this Ov51x-guide:http://blog.thedarkmere.net/index.ph...peg-guide.html].

If you reboot after installing the drivers in the first part, you'll notice the webcam is not detected anymore. Therefore we need to make these modules permanent, so that your machine recognizes the webcam both at bootup as well when you plug it in. The problem here with respect to other module installations is that for some obscure reason, the ov519_decomp module insists in loading the ov511 module when loading through modprobe, and ov511 knows nothing of some of the functions in ov519_decomp and therefore complains.

We will thus load ov51x normally through modprobe, but we will load ov519_decomp through insmod. Let us look at the steps to do this.

1. Load modules at start up

Make sure you load the vidoedev and i2c_core modules at bootup: to do this, in the terminal type:

{{{sudo vi /etc/modules }}}

or

{{{gksudo gedit /etc/modules }}}

At the end of the files, add the following two lines: