What a trip…I decided to see if I could get a webcam running properly under Ubuntu. The answer was eventually yes, but it was a little bit of work.

First of all I did a little homework and found that Logitech webcams were the most likely to be recognized by Linux. The company, bless ‘em, works with the linux community to provide the rest of us with the correct drivers. There’s a very nice list of supported webcams here, it’s worth checking this out first. Some webcams will work “out of the box”, but most will probably need to have either spca5xx (linux kernel versions prior to 2.6.11) or gspcav1 (versions after, which includes Ubuntu’s Edgy Eft).

Now, as far as IM’s go, there are pretty much two choices: amsn (for MSN, which I didn’t even bother with, because I don’t even have an msn account) and kopete which supports both MSN and Yahoo (among others), with webcam support on MSN/Yahoo protocols. I have a Yahoo account (as does my friend with whom I tested) so that’s what I used.

I ordered the Logitech (QuickCam Chat) and in the meantime tested out receiving the images from my friend (who ran hers on the regular Yahoo application from her Windows XP setup). The initial trial run was disappointing as all I ever got from her webcam was the first still in the stream and nothing further. Upon some investigation, which included the helpful folks at the kopete-devel mailing list, who informed me that my version, 0.12.3, needed to be updated to 0.12.4.

At this point, I got a little bit confused, because I could find no deb (or other) package for kopete 0.12.4, and when I said that, the response was “There is no separate tarball.” After puzzling over that for a while, I realized what they meant was that it was all rolled in with KDE itself. That is to say, if I upgraded from KDE 3.5.5 (which is what’s in the Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 distribution) to KDE 3.5.6, kopete 0.12.4 would come bundled with that. Oy. After noodling around that one for a while, I found these partial instructions for Kubuntu (other dists can look here). Once I incorporated the Riddell key, used the synaptic package manager to add one of the listed repositories (not forgetting to reload) and then, the important part, running the following command on the terminal:

sudo apt-get upgrade kubuntu-desktop

With that, I now had KDE 3.5.6 and by extension the upgraded kopete on my system. Woot! And when I fired up the connection with my friend, after a little fiddling on both our parts, her stream came through loud and clear. Double woot!!

So now the second part, getting it to recognize MY webcam (which had arrived yesterday ). This went more quickly but was a bit wonkier. First of all, I had to install and use the gspcav1 wrapper. I followed both these sets of instructions more or less (I skipped some of the setup because my system is already set up to compile things): here and here. I have no idea why there are instructions for installing spca5xx on Edgy as the linux kernel on Edgy (check with uname -r on the command line) precludes the use of spca5xx. Use the first set of instructions if you’re installing the older spca5xx stuff for linux kernels prior to 2.6.11; the second set if you’re installing gspcav1. But note that either way you’ll modprob something called spca5xx so don’t let that surprise you.

And this time, my webcam was up and running and ran just fine on kopete to my friend’s screen. So it was all quite good. The only issue left is whether or not the webcam can be set somehow to be less choppy. It’s really got a horrendous refresh rate, and it must be possible to clear that up a bit? If any of you have suggestions, please feel free to let me know.

Hope this helped someone out. My understanding is that webcameras and the like remain a weak spot in Linux, and it’s certainly true nothing worked out of the box (I do understand some webcams do not need the spca5xx/gspcav1 wrapper, and do work when plugged in, so it might be worth finding those; I was a cheapskate and got the cheapest camera that seemed to work alright.) However, it wasn’t too bad getting it to work; the worst part was finding all the information.

I also made use of a nice quick little tool just to verify that the webcam worked (for some reason my friend isn’t at her computer 24/7 with HER webcam for testing purposes…) called camorama which I found available in the synaptic package manager as well. It was a handy utility to verify that the webcam was indeed working.

Seems everything’s updating all at once –

Internet Explorer 7 for XP

Updated to this at work, no problems. Seems to be running just fine. I’ve snagged the standalone version for 6.0 so that I should be able to continue with testing/development on both. Sigh. Not quite at the point of setting up multiboot between XP and Vista, but we’ll see.

Firefox 2.0

Update on my Windows machine, no problems. Looks VERY nice. I appreciate the tabbing features except for the fall-off scrolling at both ends. I was prepared to hate the close tabs, but they only show up once the tab is active, which means I don’t hit them by accident the way I used to when I tried an older extension. I love the integration with the various feed readers, I was able to remove the Bloglines button and with the MiniMenu extension save some serious real estate on the top. Will be nice to upgrade to 2.0 on my laptop, where the real estate would really be handy.

Ubuntu 6.10

I had no trouble with upgrading from Hoary to Dapper, but a friend did. So this time ’round I’m sitting out the upgrade for a little while. And it sounds like Edgy has some rough spots, so I’m in no hurry. A fresh install may work better than an update over Dapper, but I’ll monitor it for a while longer.

Wordpress 2.0.5

Important security upgrade, you should do it — here and also here. It only takes a few seconds to upgrade if you use Mark’s diff zip file, which I did. Even with the potential bug (which he has a fix for), I would go ahead and update. Keep an eye on Mark’s blog for more info on 2.0.5.

I’ve been playing around with Amarok the last couple of days as well. When I saw a friend with an ipod who had the lyrics also downloaded with the songs, I started salivating and of course went off to check what would work with an ipod off an ubuntu installation.

Dapper Drake seems to have the 1.3.9 version of Amarok installed, so after a little poking around, I added the following

deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/amarok-142 dapper main

to my /etc/apt/sources.list file. Going back to the Synaptic Package Manager, it now lists Amarok 1.4.2 for an update. So I updated that, and went back to my playlists.

But nothing plays! All it says is “No Audio Channel” …!

After a little more digging around, I find out that for some reason libxine 1.1.1 broke support of playing FLAC files. This was, of course, the format I’d chosen to copy my CD’s over into my computer. It’s been fixed in 1.1.2, but 1.1.1 is the version in Dapper Drake (I do not know what plans are for fixing this in the 6.0.6 release: this one certainly seems to mandate a backport for functionality). In any case, following instructions on this page and snagging this patch as given by the user “Ivo Man” resolved this little problem.

And now I’m happily listening to my playlists. I even hooked up a pair of speakers to my laptop!

It’s been a few days since the official release of the Dapper Drake Ubuntu 6.06 distribution. It was actually not a huge change for me, because I had installed the Beta distribution six weeks ago and so got the upgrades in increments (sometimes, it seemed, every single night). Overall I had no glitches, save one in which my NetworkManager installation got uninstalled in the initial switch to the Beta distribution.

In any case, the transition went very smoothly for me. I’ll be honest, though. I’m a fairly lightweight user and I have an aging laptop (only in computer land is a two year old product “ancient”) so I did not see performance improvements — or degradations for that matter — during beta and final installationst. I use a locally run USB printer, and my wireless works although I’ve gone back to the command line iwconfig for now. I also haven’t actually gone in and double checked what the upgrade did to my LAMP installation. I should do that…

But for others the upgrade did not go so well, and it’s been enlightening, to say the least, to read the various discussions. For a bit of background, it’s important to know that Ubuntu initially started out by promising six month distribution releases. An important feature of a linux distribution is its timely release. In open source, the pace of upgrades, security plugging and bug fixes is high. A distribution not only collects a particular set of linux tools but also integrates particular versions and fixes together which can be nontrivial. Not every linux user wants to fiddle with package dependencies of which there can be hundreds. In addition with regular distribution releases, other projects and business can plan their own releases around the distribution.

So, when Ubuntu announced a six week delay with the Dapper Drake release, it caused some consternation but inasmuch as this was an intended LTS release, most seemed to settle on “wait and see” on whether the delay was justified.

Problems have surfaced quickly, though, and Ubuntu will need to resolve them given the double barrell of having delayed this particular release and of its being the first intended for long term support. The problems include the following:

1. Issues between CUPS, Gnome, and certain printers as documented here. What’s very interesting to note is if you scroll/search down the comments, look for Pascal’s comment, a little more than half way through (searching on the term “Project Ridley” in Pascal’s comment should work) where he says “The problems described here are because gnome-print libraries are not maintained and buggy. […] Until then we are stuck with gnome-print in dapper (GTK+ 2.8). ” However, many of the comments describe how the printers worked in 5.10, and then partially throughout the beta Dapper releases until they stop working altogether in the final release, so it still appears the issue could be addressed from wthin Dapper until these libraries are upgraded. Even if it’s not Ubuntu’s fault, the point is that people can’t use the printers in this distribution.
2. A live CD that doesn’t boot is downright embarrassing.
3. More troubling are assorted wireless issues, here, and here. In particular check the dates through the comments on the first bug report. Reading through them, it’s clear that this was discussed for three months.

Most of these do appear to be external library and hardware issues, but they were not present in Breezy (5.10). That makes this distro appear a step backwards for those users hit by these bugs. It also raises the question of how Dapper could work around these issues anyway since the systems experiencing these problems are the same ones running 5.10 (which further undermines the appearance of these bugs being hardware related). I’m very curious about what exactly happened in the last set of releases to expose the bugs from the penultimate beta Dapper to the final Dapper.

Now there are several issues that Linux gets to deal with that Windows doesn’t, at least from the user perspective. Most people purchase their computers with Windows already loaded (and tuned for their hardware — think of all those extra CD’s you get from Dell/Gateway/Compaq/etc with the drivers, etc) so they don’t see problems. And if they just purchase another computer when done with this, they may never notice. But, as practically anyone who has reinstalled Windows can attest, you can not simply reformat the hard drive, pop that CD back in and go your merry way. You often have to go searching for the latest drivers and such to install (and if you were unlucky enough to have your internet access disabled along with the rest, you’ll be searching on someone else’s computer and transporting the results back on your flash drive…)

And of course you can’t readily purchase a computer with Linux installed on it for you. I’ve heard it’s theoretically possible. For example supposedly if you request it of Gateway, they’ll do it, although that was a few years back and of course I have no idea what distribution it would be. And of course, given that there’s hundreds of distributions available, the chances of your favorite Linux being available preinstalled on a computer you plan to buy is remote. But I don’t see this as a bad thing, so much. It forces the Linux distributions to constantly improve how they self-install. Windows doesn’t have to worry about this; most of their installations are done by techs before the computers are shipped out. And over the years of lack of competition, they’ve never been forced to improve that process.

Anyway, the one thing I’ve been searching for and not finding is any announcement of patches or releases to fix or address these problems. I’ve had a few upgrades come through since the Dapper final release, but these appeared to be relatively minor fixes. Hope these are addreesed in some official way soon.