Slashdot Log In
Lone Programmer Writes 352 Webcam Drivers For Linux
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Apr 30, 2007 04:23 PM
from the twelve-cases-of-ballz-later dept.
from the twelve-cases-of-ballz-later dept.
mrneutron2004 writes "A French physician and ardent Linux supporter is the one man you can all thank for adding support for 352 webcams in Linux. The Open Source OS world may still be a bit of a mess when competing with the ease of Windows, but efforts like this make you wonder. One man with drive, tenacity, and no funding does what no one else can do. And none of the major Linux distributions back this guy's efforts, even the big players dipping into the corporate world's coffers."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Lone Programmer Writes 352 Webcam Drivers For Linux
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 450 comments
(Spill at 50!) | Index Only
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Hey Scuttlemonkey (Score:5, Funny)
The French help America once again! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The French help America once again! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The French help America once again! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm English, of course, so I can say with easy conviction that I love France and hate the French. Especially my ex-girlfriend.
Re:The French help America once again! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a pretty hysterical claim considering the scum that the Americans have armed over the last five decades. Saddam, anyone? The fucking TALEBAN?
2) harbor some of the most radical people on this planet starting with kommeni
YOU created the disaster in Iran with your idiotic Shah - if you want to go looking for despots and lunatics in exile, London and New York harbour as many if not more than Paris.
3) like them and their quefranbec relations have an ENTIRE GOVERNMENT AGENCY on the preservation of french.... in others words to keep OUT AMERICAN INFLUENCES on culture and lanquage
Who will look after the French language and culture if not the French? Do ordinary Americans actually WANT corporate 'culture' - whether from the US or anywhere else - to flood the planet?
4) lack of support of its allies, namely the US, since WWII
What have you done that merited support and was not supported by the French? DOn't forget how the US didn't support (officially) the British in the Falklands, and where has British support of the calamity in Itaq gotten us? Blind support is even worse than blind opposition.
dissent
Re:First frenchman in history (Score:5, Insightful)
The French are notorious for not giving up, with one exception, when their "allies" deserted them with the entire German army on their doorstep.
"Liberty or Death" is a false dichotomy, and a phrase that can only be repeated by someone that has never had to make that choice.
You don't win wars by dying, you win them by living.
Re:First frenchman in history (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.justgiving.com/garethowen | Last Journal: Thursday October 31 2002, @02:07PM)
Re:First frenchman in history (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:First frenchman in history (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday November 10 2006, @02:16PM)
Re:First frenchman in history (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.mrnaz.com/)
Re:First frenchman in history (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday November 10 2006, @02:16PM)
I'll cut that off right there, since the reasons they are beyond the pale to Americans are because they don't glorify America, and because they aren't about Americans. We're so self-centered that even movies about Britain need to be about Americans in Britain.
Not speaking for all Americans, hell, I'm not even speaking of my own views, but mainstream American culture disgusts me.
Re:First frenchman in history (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.egoboo.com/)
Or to make things worse, they take things that the Brits did [imdb.com] (before the Yanks entered the War) and pretended that Americans did it. :)
Re:Hey Scuttlemonkey (Score:5, Informative)
(http://moranar.com.ar/ | Last Journal: Sunday June 08 2003, @04:58PM)
God, I shouldn't need to write this.
WOW!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WOW!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Friday January 24 2003, @07:59PM)
Re:WOW!!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Thursday September 15 2005, @12:33PM)
Re:WOW!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
(http://barrett.9hells.org/ | Last Journal: Friday October 06 2006, @09:25PM)
From TFA:
MX: Starting with the Sunplus chipset support, I realised that most code in the core driver could be "shareable" to support several webcam chipset(s). That is why the "GSPCA" drivers now support over 250 webcams from different chipset vendors.
Re:WOW!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WOW!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
He didn't made 253 different drivers, but one driver that works on 253 different webcams that have a lot in common.
Writing a solid core that easily integrates with over 253 device-specific modules is something to be DAMNED impressed by. I always love it when I'm given some new requirement at work, and it just fits right in to my existing infrastructure almost effortlessly. It means I designed the thing properly in the first place. This guy has done that, 253 times.Yes, a machine. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yes, a machine. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://maydaydc.mahost.org/)
No way! The last thing we need is an American werewolf cluster in Paris.
Re:WOW!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
There. Fixed that.
Amazing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Funny)
s/can/wants to/g
There. Fixed that for you.
That's because he doesn't any more (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.tranglos.com/)
Summary Title (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Summary Title (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot Title? 253
Article text/Slashdot summary? 352
Article photo caption? 235
For once (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.metatrontech.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 21, @01:39PM)
Re:Summary Title (Score:5, Funny)
(http://reverend.healeys.net/)
Dear Michel Xhaard (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let the market speaks (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://shawn.redhive.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 26 2005, @09:04AM)
Apparently he really enjoyed the project, because he went and did basically the same thing a few hundred times more. Good for him.
This is why I wrote a Wacom driver for Mac OS X (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://thinkyhead.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 28 2004, @04:32AM)
So it doesn't surprise me that this guy's driver works for so many cameras. So many of these hardware devices with different brand names use the same off-the-shelf chip-sets. And serial devices are all very similar in their protocols, so new drivers are easier to make.
I don't think my driver for their old serial tablets has cost Wacom much in sales, and that was never the intent. Their new USB tablets are thinner and totally hassle-free, which makes them attractive for most people. There have been a few people who told me they had specifically held out on buying a new Wacom USB tablet, and who either had put the old one away or were using it with Mac OS 9. And there were a few people who had bought USB-Serial adapters only to find that no driver existed to make their tablets work. I sympathized with both situations somewhat, and this also spurred me on.
As an open source developer I have the advantage of total loyalty to my project, and not to any other parasitic motive. So when I get a feature working in my driver or control panel, it remains available. A company may remove features to encourage upgrades, and reducing functionality for non-technical reasons is evil.
I propose a new holiday: Driver Writers' Day. It could co-incide with the date of the first shipment of Mountain Dew.
Re:Let the market speaks (Score:5, Insightful)
What if its been sat in a drawer for years 'cos it worked "sometimes" and you didn't find a real use because of the stability?
What if it was second hand?
Some people cannot afford to waste money buying extra kit and won't look the gift horse in the mouth.
We have become such a wasteful generation.
If something doesn't quite work right, we throw it away.
Cameras are technically simple and most will work in a similar manner (theres only so many ways you can send the same data across a wire). My bet is this guy has created a core driver and is using variants on the devices, this allows all those useless cameras before to now be usable. There must be millions of similar working devices around the world.
Why bitch at him for helping?
People now won't have to suffer with crap 'cos they can be made to work well (apparently).
props to him.
Re:Let the market speaks (Score:5, Informative)
(http://skippus.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday June 19 2005, @07:25AM)
No, you misunderstand. The person who gave up on W2K is the reporter, not the guy who created the drivers. The guy who wrote the drivers did it because he bought webcams for his daughters and they didn't have drivers.
As for you comment, it's not the camera that has the problem; it's the drivers, and that's what he fixed for Linux. In your analogy, it's more like buying a used car with a heavy discount because it has a dirty air filter. If you know that the car is perfectly fine with a new air filter, why not buy it? A famous man once said, "A dirty air filter does not a bad car make." (Okay, I admit it, it was me, just then, and I guess I'm not that famous.)
Re:Let the market speaks (Score:5, Funny)
(http://artofproblems...orum/weblog.php?w=34)
Re:Let the market speaks (Score:4, Funny)
(Last Journal: Saturday October 20, @06:40PM)
well, that was before after editors wrote the title and before their wrote the summary.
He might not have a TV
Re:Let the market speaks (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://daleglass.net/)
In Linux, this is possible. You actually have chances of getting somebody knowledgeable to tell you that the hardware itself sucks (there used to be comments about how much realtek hardware sucks somewhere in the kernel source), or that the driver isn't properly written. Linux also makes it easy to make it possible for people to tell you so: somebody can tell you to run "lspci -v" and "dmesg" and paste it into your mail, which is easy even if you have no clue what all that stuff is.
Windows on the other hand, gets more and more obscure with each passing day. Starting from XP it reboots instead of letting you see the BSOD, so without considerable effort you can't even find what went wrong. You go to make tea, come back, and the box mysteriosly rebooted meanwhile. Windows installations are also often infested with spyware, which makes it a lot harder to figure out what exactly is going wrong, as something going wrong in bizarre ways is depressingly common.
There's also that consumers are simply not informed. Most people don't spend time googling around to try to find out whether the webcam they're about to buy is any good. If they find reviews, often they will be by somebody who tried it for 15 minutes, which will miss any longer term issues. About the only way of a bad one getting abandoned by consumers is that it's such incredible crap that even people with no experience at all see it's horrible and return it.
Re:Object oriented? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://daleglass.net/)
Re:Let the market speaks (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://daleglass.net/)
I've seen it in practice on Linux -- my bug report resulted in an email from the developer the next day, and a fix for the bug I found in the next few hours.
Sure you can send reports to MS, but I've never ever seen anything come out of it. If the device manufacturer ever gets around fixing it I won't hear about it, and if MS does fix it I won't notice either -- it'll be quietly rolled into the next service pack that might come out 4 months later, if it gets there at all.
And that still doesn't address what I was talking about, anyway. Yeah, great, the user can click "ok" and get a dump sent to MS. Wonderful. And meanwhile what? An user still can't find out what failed without a developer's asistance, and on Linux those are a whole lot easier to get a hold of, and a lot more responsive. Patches for kernel exploits come out in *hours*.
Re:253 or 352? (Score:5, Funny)
Ballz? (Score:4, Funny)
Just don't ask how a physician gets twelve cases of balls... *crosses legs*
Mad props (Score:3, Insightful)
But not, apparently... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 22 2006, @10:27PM)
Re:But not, apparently... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.game-point.net/ | Last Journal: Monday November 14 2005, @09:19AM)