acer crystal eyeMy recently bought laptop is equipped with this webcam. I am talking about Acer Aspire 5520G, the cheap model from this Acer series. You know, cheap laptop, with linux compatible devices and stuff like this. Everything worked flawless except the webcam, the 5-in-1 card reader and wireless interface. NDISwrapper made my wlan0 work without any problems, with Windows XP drivers and I was able to access the Internet through my wireless router. Now, I had in mind to make my webcam. A little Google job showed me a lot of result from ubuntuforums, but many of them were crap, except this one. So, I’ve downloaded lucview, I’ve compiled it (make sure you have libsdl installed before you try “make”ing it) and surprise surprise. It didn’t work, and failed. After I’ve joined the uvc-devel mailing list, I’ve told exactly what Laurent Pinchart, one of the maintainers of linux-uvc project : make sure every old uvc module was removed before install the new one. So, I’ve deleted all the occurrences of uvcvideo.ko that I found on /lib/modules/<kernel version> . You can easily use find tool help yourself and don’t waste time searching for it.

After that, I’ve run make to make the kernel modules I’ve need, make install to install them and modprobe uvcvideo to make sure everything was in place. lsmod confirmed that the modules were properly loaded and tail /var/log/syslog too. I’ve started skype and called a friend of mine. After I’ve enabled the web cam, I’ve realized everything was in place and I’ve announced Laurent Pinchart that I managed to make my webcam work. Even if the image is mirrored and the colors are not so vivid, I’m pretty sure that I’ll manage to solve this problem too.

So, now I’ll give you a walkthrough the process of making the Acer CrystalEye cam work under Mandriva Linux 2008 (and not only!). Before reading the instructions below, make sure every dependency is installed and build tools are also available (gcc, etc.) :

[afaith@localhost ~]$ su < br/>
Password: type your password< br/>
[root@localhost afaith]# cd /usr/src browse to the source directory< br/>
[root@localhost src]# wget http://afaith.eu/download/linux-uvc.tar.bz2 download linux-uvc r178 svn build from server or try svn< br/>
[root@localhost src]# mkdir linux-uvc make a directory for the downloaded archive< br/>
[root@localhost src]# mv linux-uvc.tar.bz2 linux-uvc move the archive to that directory< br/>
[root@localhost src]# cd linux-uvc browse into newly created directory that contains the archive< br/>
[root@localhost src]# tar xvfj linux-uvc.tar.bz2 extract files from bzip2 archive< br/>
[root@localhost linux-uvc]# make compile linux-uvc< br/>
[root@localhost linux-uvc]# rmmod uvcvideo remove old uvcvideo kernel module< br/>
[root@localhost linux-uvc]# rm -rf /lib/modules/`uname -r`/usb/media/uvcvideo.ko erase it - this might show you an error if it wasn’t installed at all< br/>
[root@localhost linux-uvc]# make install install the new compilled kernel module< br/>
[root@localhost linux-uvc]# lsmod | grep uvcvideo make sure no other uvcvideo module is loaded< br/>
[root@localhost linux-uvc]# modprobe uvcvideo load uvcvideo module< br/>
[root@localhost linux-uvc]# cd .. up one directory< br/>
[root@localhost src]# wget http://afaith.eu/download/luvcview.tar.bz2 now download the luvcview program that will help you test your webcam from my server or from the original location< br/>
[root@localhost src]# tar xvfj luvcview.tar.bz2 extract bzip2 archive< br/>
[root@localhost src]# cd luvcview-20070512 browse into the newly created directory< br/>
[root@localhost luvcview-20070512]# make compile this program. make sure libsdl it’s installed! otherwise this step it will fail< br/>
[root@localhost luvcview-20070512]# ./luvcview -f yuv before this step you could also take a look at the README file< br/>

Now you can use your webcam with Skype, Kopete or any other program that uses your webcam. Known issues :

  1. Adobe Flash won’t work with this webcam. As far as I know you can’t use in this program
  2. Image could be flipped horizontally
  3. Colors might need a little setup, because they are not so vivid

More informations you can find here :

Ubuntu forum ACER 5520 thread

Linux UVC Official Website

Linux UVC Mailing list

Hope this will help you folks. For everything you need and consider I might know the answer, don’t hesitate to comment or ask help. If you play nice and do your homework, you can be pretty sure that I will make anything possible to help you. Romanian version of this is on the way.