Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Lone Programmer Writes 352 Webcam Drivers For Linux

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Apr 30, 2007 05:23 PM
from the twelve-cases-of-ballz-later dept.
Software Linux
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."
+ -
story
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Lone Programmer Writes 352 Webcam Drivers For Linux 25 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Hey Scuttlemonkey (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2007, @05:25PM (#18933357)
    What kind of a geek misspells Bawls? And an editor at Slashdot no less. For SHAME!

  • Amazing (Score:5, Funny)

    by SirJorgelOfBorgel (897488) * on Monday April 30 2007, @05:25PM (#18933367)
    An amazing feat, this man should be recognized. Linux will never be on the desktop if your teenage daughter cant videochat with predators 2000 miles away! I for one welcome this new voyeur overlord.

    • Re:Amazing (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2007, @05:46PM (#18933651)
      > "One man with drive, tenacity, and no funding does what no one else can do."

      s/can/wants to/g

      There. Fixed that for you. :)

  • Summary Title (Score:5, Funny)

    by jeffy210 (214759) on Monday April 30 2007, @05:26PM (#18933371)
    And even the summary title wants to short him for 99 cameras to his credit!

  • Dear Michel Xhaard (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2007, @05:26PM (#18933375)
    Thank you

  • But not, apparently... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by UbuntuDupe (970646) * on Monday April 30 2007, @05:28PM (#18933423) Journal
    important enough for his name to get into a Slashdot summary. Oh well, at least he wasn't referred to as "the French Linux driver guy", like how Ramanujan was "the Indian math guy".

  • I hate this.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by .Chndru (720709) on Monday April 30 2007, @05:31PM (#18933453)
    The man wrote 350+ drivers. How about some link love for him, slashdot? http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html [mxhaard.free.fr]

  • Not 352 seperate drivers (Score:5, Informative)

    by rminsk (831757) on Monday April 30 2007, @05:41PM (#18933583)
    The programmer did not write 352 seperate drivers for web cams, he wrote drivers for 8 different camera bridge chips and different versions of those chipss.

    • Re:Let the market speaks (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cowscows (103644) on Monday April 30 2007, @05:33PM (#18933475) Journal
      Some people enjoy the challenge and the work involved in maintaining and/or improving things that they own, whether that's a car or a computer. This guy could've thrown his webcam away and then gotten another, but instead he installed an OS where he could freely see and tinker with all the guts, and make the hardware he had already spent money on work.

      Apparently he really enjoyed the project, because he went and did basically the same thing a few hundred times more. Good for him.

    • Re:Let the market speaks (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Monday April 30 2007, @05:36PM (#18933515) Homepage Journal
      What if you got the camera without realising it?
      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)

      by KingSkippus (799657) * on Monday April 30 2007, @05:37PM (#18933517) Homepage Journal

      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, Insightful)

      by DaleGlass (1068434) on Monday April 30 2007, @05:46PM (#18933659) Homepage
      So how does the market know?

      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)

          by DaleGlass (1068434) on Monday April 30 2007, @06:02PM (#18933867) Homepage
          See my other post, it's the same thing as with sound cards for instance. Linux doesn't have a driver specifically for the "Creative SB Live Value", it has a driver for the EMU10K1 chip the card is based on. This driver works for several models of the SB Live series, and perhaps even for non-Creative cards if some other company builds cards using the EMU10K1 chip.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.