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."

Comments

WOW!!!!

[axia777]

I am stunned. That is a lot of code to write. That guy is a machine. Props to him 100%.

Re:WOW!!!!

[pclminion]

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.

Dear Michel Xhaard

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you

But not, apparently...

[UbuntuDupe]

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".

Re:Let the market speaks

[cowscows]

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

[LiquidCoooled]

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:Not 352 seperate drivers

[Bastard of Subhumani]

I don't know about you, but in that case he beats me by at least 8 bridge chips and numerous versions thereof ...

Re:Let the market speaks

[DaleGlass]

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:Not 352 seperate drivers

[ewhac]

Having written my share of device drivers, that's still an accomplishment worthy of note, especially if the documentation was thin or (unjustifiably, all-too often) non-existent.

Schwab

Re:First frenchman in history

[Anonymous Coward]

If of course, by "in history", you mean other than 99.9% of the rest of history.

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

[pivo]

French surrender jokes are the favorite joke of people who know just enough history to know that the French surrendered to the Germans during WWII. These surrender joke tellers probably learned this history when they read someone else's surrender joke and then figured out what it meant. It makes these people feel smart that they now know enough history to make this joke. There's probably some internet law that states that any story involving France or the French will eventually accumulate a surrender joke in the comment area. Jokes like these are the essence of not funny.

Re:Let the market speaks

[DaleGlass]

It's a nice theory, but I've never seen it in practice.

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:First frenchman in history

[Red Flayer]

For those of us that deal globally with many countries and cultures, the answer is clear: While most of the French people are fairly nice, we find their government and "culture" to be arrogant and insincere, particularly the official attitude toward individual Americans over the years.

As an American, can I just say that though the French may have deservedly earned such a reputation (I'm not sure how deservedly in general, by my personal experiences corroborate it), your post is the height of hypocracy? The American hubris is awful, considering we are falling down the same slope of crashing hegemony as the French did -- and very soon all we'll have left is our pride. We talk of the superiority of the American political system, American sports, American pop culture, etc -- but the Chinese or the Indians or the Pacific Rim countries will scoff at our arrogant hubris when it's all we have left.

Re:First frenchman in history

[Red Flayer]

I think the American attitude comes from the John Wayne complex we have. The perception is that only cowards and women need people to do their fighting for them (which was the perception of the insulated Americans at home during WWII). Americans at home had no idea of what the French faced; a lot of Americans overseas were just bitter with their lot in the war.

There are even quite a few movies made about the French Resistance. Perhaps some of them are considered beyond the pale to some Americans, because of the

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:The French help America once again!

[Anonymous Coward]

1) who will sell mirages to any sand dictator that comes along

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