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Lone Programmer Writes 352 Webcam Drivers For 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."
What kind of a geek misspells Bawls? And an editor at Slashdot no less. For SHAME!
I am stunned. That is a lot of code to write. That guy is a machine. Props to him 100%.
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.
And even the summary title wants to short him for 99 cameras to his credit!
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
Thank you
So a bad driver caused him to give up on W2K, then he proceeds to spend endless hours of creating drivers for those crappy webcams?
Wouldn't it be better that an ill-supported webcam gets abandoned by the consumers, thus giving the market better-supported webcams as manufacturers are forced to lift up their games?
Would you buy a (oh no not again) cheap car with an oil leak, knowing that there's a free and simple way of fixing it? Or would you demand the car manufacturer to get its act together and fix the leak before its cars get out of the factory?
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Either way it's a lot, but the Slashdot editors really suck.
I don't respond to AC's.
253 or 352?
Congratulations to mxhaard! Good job bringing that project up, online, and keeping it alive for so many years. The drivers, spcaview, and spcatools have been excellent quality since I began using them in '99/'00.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
No job or life, but lots of nude pic sharing.
You can't handle the truth.
how many people are going to point out the error in the summary before it gets fixed? give me a break, typos happen all the time, people. if you RTFA, it says 352 webcams
The article says 352...
from the twelve-cases-of-ballz-later department
Just don't ask how a physician gets twelve cases of balls... *crosses legs*
Mad props 733t d00d, or insert your favorite way to say, great job, thank you, and keep up the good work.
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".
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Is it 253 or 352?
Wow that must be a lot of copy-pastes. His left arm little, middle and index fingers must be pretty fatigued by now.
One man with drive, tenacity, and no funding does what no one else can do.
Should read:
One man with drive, tenacity, no funding, earning his livelihood elsewhere, and with no one to question whether he earned a dime doing this and with no shareholder expecting you to maximize your profits does what no one else can do. A corporation will start off asking "How many people will use webcams on linux and how much $$ can we make if we write drivers for them".
The man wrote 350+ drivers. How about some link love for him, slashdot? http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html
so is it 253 or 352??
352 webcams, 253 webcams - which is correct? Impossible to find out with this article, since the referenced article refers to BOTH numbers, just as the summary article and headline on slashdot do! Sheesh.
If you read his CV on his website, you'll notice that he is a physicist, not a physician.
The confusion stems from the interview, where he calls himself a physician:
physicist is called "physicien" (pronounced "physician) in French !
Stephane
In software too there are lots of people contributing who see nothing more than a tiny credit notice buried deep in the binary or in the header comments as rewards enough. Many of these contributors are actually academic researchers. Almost in every office/cubicle you would see books like Numerical Recipes. Wish the open source contributors would be seen and respected as academic researchers. Like the academics, these developers work on projects they like and fiercely independent.
Corporations whose main core business is not really computers and technology would be wise to invest in creating independent institutions that can create standard compliant implementations.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Is somebody dyslexic?
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.
Too bad all the stupid chicks that show their tits, don't use linux.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
the French kiss!
So where is the heroic bureaucrat who can get this hellhole running so efficiently, that all the labour can be done by a single Australian man?
Fuck Slashdot
Maybe, but according to the article, he has had sex at least two times more than you have.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
thats a lot of webcams,he was probably as busy as a one-armed paper hanger for a long time. i bet horny teenage boys around the world appreciate this, personally i have no use for a webcam...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
one can argue that this was not entirely the fault of Slashdot editors. Maybe the real number was 532?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
How about a link to his paypal account? Anyone?
I'd donate a few bucks.
and in other news, dyslexia runs rampant on dotslash...flim and elven.
step children in the computer world. Especially web cams.
Add to that the misery of attempting to hack to every proprietary firmware variation on every camera and hunting down someone who knows something about the camera firmware/driver and the misery is tripled. I know I owe this guy for my webcam working like magic.
In theory with SIP (VOIP) video conferencing is ready for the masses, but I still don't see web cams taking off as a kind of must-have accessory. You still don't see brands like HP jumping in and flushing logitech out of the business.
Anyone have any insight as to why that is?
The best one I ever saw was a USB product that was sold under the Kodak brand. I was shocked at how bad the integrated web cam in the mac laptop is.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I wonder whether he used an object oriented approach? Many cameras share common functionality, whether it be chipset or processing method, so much of that functionality could be inherited and tweaked according to the camera at hand. Doing so makes the task of targeting so many cameras that much easier. This is not to take anything away from the work this guy did, just an observation from the side lines.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
To not give up.
I counted 3 different permutations of the numbers [2,3,5] used in the article. Does anyone know which it is? An astounding feat, no matter which it is, of course.
"One man writes Linux drivers for 352 webcams"
"A LONE HOBBYIST programmer sitting at his home in France is responsible for adding 352 USB webcams to the list of those supported by Linux."
"All 235 low-cost webcams supported in Linux thanks to... this man"
"The surprise was more shocking when I realized that drivers for 235 webcams -at the time of this writing- are the work of a single unknown hero who works from his home in France"
"So how did the ice ball grow to reach today's 253+ webcams supported with several different chipsets?"
Welcome our French Linux contributors.
I also want to extend my appreciation to France for helping to spread democracy and freedom to the former United States of America,
now called, the United Gulags of America thanks to the Chairman, The Military-Industrial-CONGRESSIONAL Complex.
Patriotically as always,
Kilgore Trout, C.E.O.
OK, so this gentleman didn't get money for his efforts. He wasn't hired by some major Linux distributer to write the drivers. I think he did it simply because a lot of supported webcams increased the likelihood that he could see someone naked and performing in front of a webcam.
This guy wrote drivers that support 253 webcams, not 253 drivers.
Linux isn't Windows. In Windows, a Creative webcam would appear in the device manager as a "Creative Webcam". In Linux, a driver supports the chip the camera uses, not the specific camera itself. Logitech or Creative usually won't be making the whole camera from scratch. Instead, they purchase the electronics from some chinese company, then build their own body around it, and write some software to support it.
In the screenshots it can be easily seen that "Trust", "Canon" and "Logitech" webcams are all supported by the same driver.
The Open Source OS world may still be a bit of a mess when competing with the ease of Windows,
You must be kidding. The only thing that's "easier" about Windows is the fact that it's preinstalled; other than that, it's the most messy and tedious desktop OS among the four major ones (Windows, Mac, Linux/Gnome, and Linux/KDE).
He'd written 253 drivers when the article was started and wrote the other 99 drivers while the article was being written.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It actually has quite nice quality/features for a cheap camera: metal body, LED's that turn on in low-light, and the picture quality is actually quite nice. I recently started using it again and just went through the process of digging up drivers that would compile against my newer kernel.
One point of confusion is between the article's GSPCA/spca50x drivers, and the SPCA50X drivers on SF.net
The latter I had run into first, but it won't compile against my newer 2.6 kernel. Luckily, I was able to find the mxhaard drivers, which worked nicely, and get the thing going after a little while.
All said, big Kudos to Michel for gifting us all with well-working cheap webcams!
First of all I want to say kudos to this driver developer. While the article is in fact wrong (he did not write 352 drivers, he wrote 8 those 8 drivers just support 352 known cameras), 8 device drivers is still a large accomplishment, and thanks to him for sure. I am certain this was very hard and difficult work.
However -this guy is not alone, and no this is not really an isolated occurrence (it is not "news"). Nearly every device driver IN LINUX has been written by people like this - people who are unpaid and just want their stuff to work.
The RedHats and the IBMs of the world finance more of the back-end kernel architecture development and finance support for their own hardware (IBM) and features (Intel). The vast majority of drivers for consumer-level devices are unfunded. They are developed by hobbiests who just want to make things work and then share their work with everyone else.
Much thanks and praise should go to all of these tireless kung-fu wizards who are overlooked every day. Without them Linux would not be where it is today - and in fact I would not be working in the job I am.
Thanks to ALL kernel developers!
I mean, webcam, geeks, lack of a girlfriend... I would've said this has to come naturally. Akin to "If you build it, they will come".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There are two models: The 352 webcam, and the 253 webcam. He wrote drivers for them both.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Don't chat them up over a webcam. :)
Especially if you are running linux
Those things all understand more or less the same command set. There's a "USB Video Device Class Specification". The current revision is 1.1. This Linux driver effort isn't some huge collection of drivers, which would be silly and a maintenance headache. It's a generic driver.
A few years back, I wrote a generic Firewire camera driver for QNX. It's really not that hard. These things self-identify when they hot-plug, and you can read their configuration and capabilities over the bus interface. The USB camera spec, unlike the FireWire camera spec, has some annoying Microsoft-specific stuff in it, but it's not all that pervasive.
What we need, obviously, is a Beowulf cluster of French Physicists.
I've long said usability is what has kept Linux from becoming a mainstream desktop (read: PC) OS. People like me (and I'm actually a Server Admin, mostly Windows servers, though I'm responsible for helping to maintain some Unix servers as well) who aren't n00bs by any means, but still find Linux to be fairly daunting in some respects (though it has made impressive strides over the last few years, Ubuntu, Slackware, and Suse spring immediately to mind, though my own preferred flavor is Gentoo). Why spend an enormous amount of time, and effort, and still have problems, when I could just install Windows, and go? This is a giant (imho) leap forward for Linux. Little things like this that seem arbitrary, or perhaps even superfulous, are EXACTLY the kind of efforts that the world of Linux needs.
Coming from a "die-hard" MS fan, I hope this stands out to someone. I've nothing against *nix, in fact I love my Unix servers, but as an everyday use OS, it leaves much to be desired. Now, it leaves one less thing. Die hard webcam driver making guru, I salute you.
The Energy Crisis is solved!
Stick Men
Have no mod points, but this is not -1 Troll. The previous post is funny. Let's not be unfair, shall we?
Saddam is no longer in a position to write drivers. That's why Vista users are SOL.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
...or "what no one else wants to do"?
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
For cameras using RS-232? I thought this was for USB cameras?
-1 not first post
Suppose his nickname when using the webcam is mx_HAARD ?
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
The article and the summary say that this guy is a physician, but he isn't. He's a physicist. The French word for physicist is physicien. Apparently someone got their words mixed up (but that's okay because they also appear to have their digits mixed up anyway).
...that guy is scratching!
Looks like this article was written by a drunk teenager. No flow to the story. Michel isn't asked any decent questions. Can anyone else do some justice to the amount of work he's contributed to the linux community?
..cameras watch programmers.
Well now I can see why he hasn't had time to reply to my emails about my own webcam (Sonix 0c45:613e) that doesn't yet work with the sn9c120 driver or spcaxxx.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_clas s
But since the cameras are essentially fixed-focus NTSC CCDs with framegrabbers, USB bridge chips of the week and ad-hoc Atmel microcontrollers with random firmware tying it all together... it's no wonder the Chinese OEMs just roll their own protocol and driver.
Implement a published spec! That'd take testing beyond plugging it into the engineer's laptop to see if it works.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
... means I never get any coding done :(
the vast majority of USB video cameras are not UVC compliant. Even the expensive Philips chipset-derived models are in their own world.
UVC compliance is very recent and spotty.
There's 20-odd V4L/V4L2 drivers for linux, of which more than half are just pluggable webcam drivers (mostly USB, and the lone firewire generic)
There's some USB streaming chipset support for those external S-Video adapters and DVR devices, and the rest are PCI attached devices and the venerable BT848 driver.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Pretty good distinction there
He knew the W2K driver was buggy, but didn't have a way to fix it, short of rewriting it from scratch, in which case why not write it for Linux?
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
...since those pricks can't be bothered to put out updated drivers for any of their cams older than ~6 months. I got stuck with a couple of them during the moves from 98SE to 2000 to XP and OS 9 to OS X. Never buying another camera from those fuckers again.
Connectix, you are still missed.
And again France helps America win it's freedom!!!
(Shameless plug) I had this tablet I'd spent $500 on back when it first came out, and I was going to be damned if I didn't get support for it on my favorite OS. It took something like 3 years to get it into shape, but now I have this project with a life of its own. Most recently I was prompted to add support for TabletPC computers running Mac OS X unsupported. All along the way, I've had people interested in the results, who have helped me to add support for their tablets. The internet has made it possible to collaborate instantly with people you've only just connected with for the first time, and do in a matter of days what might have taken weeks.
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.
-- thinkyhead software and media
You don't know that his daughters aren't twins.
You're probably right, though. With the last name Xhaard, I bet his sex record could make Ron Jeremy envious. Darn Frenchmen!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
There are ~257 rows of camera listings on his web page. Hopefully that will clear this up.
with dependent files, no problem. How do I find a dependency "3d6b445a058e7d3f"?
I have to applaud this person for the huge work he has done to support all these webcams under Linux. However, from what I could tell from a quick google search, he seems to be one of these developpers who write GPL drivers for Linux (also GPL) but then refuse to have them included in the mainline kernel for some mystical reason.
This situation really makes me sad because thousands, perhaps millions of people could have their webcam "just work" out of the box, but instead, they have to do all sorts of voodoo magic (look on google, find the package, compile it, patch source etc.). Statistically, a percentage of these people will spend a lot of time getting it to work, some people will fail to make it work and some won't even bother. What a waste.
The worst part of it is that the driver, being GPL, could be included legally without the autor's consent however, this would risk alienating this valuable developper. Imagine if the people developping drivers for motherboard chipsets had the same attitude and what that would do to the usability of Linux.
So please, Michel Xhaard, do a huge favor to the whole Free software comunity at little or no cost to yourself and get that driver in mainline.
This is a business model waiting to bring in the big bucks. Get some VC, some quality hardware people and have this guy join the team. Make good, true x-plattform cams. Profit.
A man with an asset like the knowlege he has is a gold mine when treated the right way.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
He needs money.
Or not.
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
Add 6 hours of RTFA and debugging, and it should work...
What, you say you can copy and paste 352 times in less than 6 hours?
Well, good for you! Now get coding!
I get endlessly annoyed at the "let the market speak" proponents who really mean simply "let people like me make the decisions," as though this guy, or Linux users, or the people who don't like the "let the market speak" philosophy... aren't a part of the market too.
Be self-consistent. If you want to "let the market speak" then you have to countenance the notion that some of that speech may not be pro-market speech. Not all consumers participate in the market purely to make products better and prices cheaper. I'd venture to say that most of them participate in the market to serve their own idiosyncratic desires... which for this person means writing drivers.
The market is speaking. It's saying that Linux drivers are cooler than better webcams, at least in some cases. So let the market speak.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
And all done with a 35 hour work week.
Have gnu, will travel.
Seriously, are these questions the best he could come up with? ("Are you aware that your site is not very well indexed?... " "Yes") Instead of hearing hte reporters opinions about how the big corps should take notice of this work, I would be much more interested in hearing how and when he got into programming, does he apply any of this in his work as a radiologist, and so on...
Wow. Talk about efficient.
Analogously, Slashdot could be seen as being a little like a website for other cultural groups using the tag line - "New
Anyone else start to hear the movie trailer guy's voice reading the summary?
In a world of drivers gone mad... one man with drive, tenacity, and no funding does what no one else can do...
So... no FreeBSD Support?
BA
I was going to grab one of the cheaper webcams but thought they'd probably be a problem in linux (as the cheapo's are a problem in windows sometimes as well)
It's nice that there is a quality rating for each camera
http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html
Are any of these cameras true usb2 cameras? I'd like to avoid the usb1 slideshow.
There, fixed it.
Man, tell me about it. I'm still exhausted from typing "emerge gspcav1"...Glad I'm not using Ubuntu, or I'd have to do about twice as much work! ("gspcav1" being much shorter to type than "gspca-source"...)
Okay, in fairness, it actually was kind of a pain finding this package in the first place, but other than that, the three different types of webcams I have floating around all DO seem to "just work" with it. And don't let the "2.6.19" thing on the Gentoo package page fool you - it seems to at least compile for 2.6.21.
Now, does anyone have any good recommendations for webcam capture software? (How the heck do I get mencoder to use the webcam for input, anyway?...)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
In other news: French physician sets record with 352 online girlfriends. "I just really like a good web strip tease," said the Frenchman.
Seriously though, bravo to the guy for improving driver support in Linux, it's more or less the one big lacking Linux needs to overcome.
I believe in respecting a developers wishes, but to me, he has told us how he wants his software treated legally by releasing it as gpl. If another gpl project uses his works and stays in compliance, how can he really be disgruntled? Otherwise he should release it with a different license.
Does he still have any friends? Seriously, this is amazing. This is one of the great feats of geekdom.
There's no place like ~.
If you're gone making tea, and your system has a BSOD and reboots, by default it wrote the details to the system log. Look in the Event Viewer.
Michel Xhaard is not a physician. He is a physicist.
The confusion comes from the French word for physicist, which is "physicien".
Michel probably told the Inquirer (mistakenly) that he was a "physician",
by which he meant "physicist".
- Anonycous Moward
In general, there is always a huge difference between people who don't get it and those that do. Well, there's just as big a gap between people who get it and people who own it. The latter not only get it, they get everything about it and what seems complex to the former is actually quite trivial to the latter. It's like the difference between someone who studied Klingon for 5 years, and the person who pumps out 300 page Klingon novels every 3 months. Most of us are like the latter (or, worse if you're me) but every now and then, you get that 1% of 1% of people that know how to take it to the next level. Like Star Wars Kid. Man, that was in a class all by itself.
I'm quite thankful to Mr. Xhaard for his contributions, but how's about throwing some scratch to the man who single handedly wrote QEMU (One of the best VirtualPC-alike packages for multiple platforms, and whose code is helping the Xen virtualization project) , KQEMU (The fast VMWare-like add-on for QEMU), FFMPEG (The FLOSS project whose codec is helping Xine, you're probably using to view streaming video if you're not on Mac/Windows codecs), TCC (a tiny standalone C compiler, which in one demo was used to compile Linux from source and boot in ) ?
The guy's name is Fabrice Bellard, his site is also on free.fr , http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/
Perhaps someone who finds his work useful would like to edit his English site docs or provide other translations?
Spoken like someone who's never programmed a device. Congratulations, you're a moron.
...for 300+ cameras.
IE, it's kinda generic. Like the freaking MOUSE driver.
Not exactly a giant deal, someone wrote a driver.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
GP REALLY needs to turn off their webcam..
Blah blah bleh blah. Get over it. Ble-ble blah.
Hmmm, very thoughtful.
People supporters write Linux code for free.
What I think is disturbing is that it looks as if it somehow strange that a volunteer doesn't get paid. Well, welcome to the real world. Volunteers are not in it for the recogniton or whatever and if they are, they should get the hell out.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
A driver is basically a look-up table with settings. Get over it.
Funny. The last driver I worked on had 3 embedded compilers, a full OS abstraction layer, garbage collector, and more than one look-up table. Drivers for similar devices have got more complicated in the time since then.
You haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Get over it.
What would Lemmy do?
This guy seriously needs to get laid!
I'm more interested in the name of the developer. How could he not be an elite hacker, with a name like Doctor Xhaard?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Probably a foreigner cause most french are dumb and lazy, I have been in France, their lunchbreak begins at 10.30 and ends at 15.00 with a hangover.
You wrote emacs? ;)
Thank god he's on linux's side. Truly a remarkable effort really.
Dude, that's really mean...
What this man needs is not funding, but a girlfriend.
He should have also given the project's page :
Here is the link
This is specially important because the most logical place people would try first, the official SF project, is lagging behind and not up to day.
Thank you, Michel Xhaard, for your wonderful work. Thanks to you my own Logitech webcam, as webcams of other geeks around the world, have worked wonderfully for the last few years on Linux.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I used to have a really slick script that would record with mencoder and pipe it to mplayer, so I could see myself talk, and then just hit q when I was done. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted it.
/dev/video0, and the audio device is probably /dev/dsp1. Notice the 1. That took me about 3 hours to figure out. Then you have to figure out how to encode to mpeg. Or if you want to take the easy way out, you use VLC and open your camera as a v4l source using the GUI. Of course, VLC is also a fat, fickle bitch, but that's another story.
Read this:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_a_webcam
You use v4l:// as your source, the video device is probable
I've never gotten any of the dedicated cam programs working. I think most of them are intended for firewire or something. Oh, and I wouldn't plan on doing much editing either. KDenLive is probably the best I've seen, even though its still a rather buggy beta.
I was impressed with Kopete, though. It worked right out of the box.
I vote for "French physicist that accidentally called himself physician in an interview" i'm pretty sure that Doppler and Ultrasound imaging has less to do with medicine than with physics (erm...http://www.centrus.com.br/DiplomaFMF/Series FMF/doppler/capitulos-html/chapter_01.htm/ not very sure actually...).
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
Strange this man could have earned quite some money if he did such work for a software house. .net develper he would have been ehm rich...
:))
Let alone if he had spend that time as a
But then if he likes to work for free, then i wonder if he can find an opensource supermarket for his food
Working for free is a bit stupid, and if you have nothing else to do but just program because you dont have any hobies or family life, then well ehm isn't he a bit poor guy then?
He might be bright, but not so gifted i think it's a bit a sad story.
For a happy ending, pay that man a buck if you use a cam with his software.
I'm also wondering his home would it look like a bigbrother house? so many cams...
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
I've used the drivers on on the shelf webcams and they work great. Not sure why they have not been pulled into the kernel.org.
A truly impressive and gratious feat.
Thanks!
(I'll donate if ever I make any money with Linux. I have still to learn how to sell.)
Expect Freedom.
Corollary to that statement: it is not the job of a soldier to die for his country, but to make the other guy die for his.
"Lonely Programmer Writes 352 Webcam Drivers For Linux"
Nevermind...
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
This man is a true American hero.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
After getting so far into this French thread, I actually got confused and had to scroll up to the top to discover what the article being discussed is. Boy was I surprised!
Now the french have a webcam for every day of the year! (except public holidays)
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
"And none of the major Linux distributions back this guy's efforts, even the big players dipping into the corporate world's coffers."
Why the hell doesn't IBM, which makes billions off Linux, at least pay this guy a frikkin' salary?
Better, why doesn't IBM and HP, both of whom make billions off Linux, start pressuring - or even paying for - certified drivers for Linux by every company that supplies peripherals and chipsets to their machines?
Now that Dell is selling Ubuntu, will Dell pressure its peripheral and chipset makers to provide certified drivers for Linux?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Slashdot Title? 253
Article text/Slashdot summary? 352
Article photo caption? 235 I vote for 666 drivers. It's a nice round number, it can't be confused by being incorrectly ordered and it's wrong.
how did this get modded up?
mods on crack.
'he seems to be one of these developpers who write GPL drivers for Linux (also GPL) but then refuse to have them included in the mainline kernel for some mystical reason'
Well I emailed him and got this reply:
'It is not "mystical reason", but a physical one: The mainline kernel did not allow video decompression. Gspca decompress the video in the kernel'
davecb5620@gmail.com