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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!
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!
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
Thank you
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.
The man wrote 350+ drivers. How about some link love for him, slashdot? http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html
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.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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.
liqbase
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.
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.
one can argue that this was not entirely the fault of Slashdot editors. Maybe the real number was 532?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Anybody else glad that they are not one of this guy's patients?
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
From TFA: FC: So how did the ice ball grow to reach today's 253+ webcams supported with several different chipsets?
MX: Starting with the Sunplus chipset support, I realised that most code in the core driver could be "shareable" to support several webcam chipset(s). That is why the "GSPCA" drivers now support over 250 webcams from different chipset vendors.
factor 966971: 966971
What we need, obviously, is a Beowulf cluster of French Physicists.
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).
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.
You only need an email address (or phone number) to send paypal money. And here you go: mxhaard@magic.fr
Paypal link: Send money - Enter email or phone
-- Note: It's on his website as well: http://mxhaard.free.fr/apropos.html
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
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.
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...
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*.