Technology Facts

I have a Vimicro 301 Neptune webcam. It works perfectly well in Windows. I wanted to use this webcame under Ubuntu too. From the net I came to know that kernel module gspca is required for fuctioning of Vimicro 301 Neptune web camera under Ubuntu. As this module doesn't come along with the Ubuntu Intrepid, I decided to download the source code for gscpa kernel module. I downloaded the source code from http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html. But when I tried to compile it, I got compilation errors.

As it was not possible to compile the gscpa source code I downloaded source code for gspca module from http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/all/gspca-source/download and tried to compile it with m-a command but I again got the compilation errors.

After failure to compile the gspca source code, I searched for more information on the Internet. Finally I found a post on one of the Ubuntu forums ,that answered this issue. The author of this post lamer1 has developed a patch for gspca source code. So I downloaded the patch gspca.patch.gz and unzipped it then I patched the gspca source code with this patch and compiled the kernel. I was too stunned to find that the gscpa module was successfully compiled. I used following commands in terminal to compile kernel and to install it.

tar -xvzf gspcav1-20071224.tar.gz
tar -xvzf gspca.patch.gz
cd gspcav1-20071224
patch < ../gspca.patch
make
sudo make install

This installed the module alright. Then I opened /etc/modprobe.d/options for editing,

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options

Now I appended following line to /etc/modprobe.d/options

options gspca force_rgb=1

Now when I plugged in the usb webcam driver showed as /dev/video0 in /dev/.

But skype wasnot able to detect the webcam.

So I changed the file permissions of /dev/video0 with following command

chmod 777 /dev/video0

Now the webcam was detected by skype all right.

Only issue I am facing now is the file permission, as I have to change file permissions of /dev/video0 with chmod everytime I plug in the webcam.