Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category

The Day I Met Linus Torvalds

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

I came across this picture from about 10 years ago…

For those who don’t know, Linus Torvalds is the creator of Linux, the open-source operating system that changed the world.

So I was at a conference in San Jose with my buddy Jake, close to time to leave to catch our plane. Jake and I were playing some pool to pass the time, and Linus Torvalds just happens to be walking by. In our excitement, Jake and I asked if he wanted to play some pool with us. It was very cool!

Anyway, I was able to get a picture with him, even though I beat him at pool :)

Linus and me

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Making the Gigaware 25-297 webcam work with Ubuntu 7.10

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

This webcam is sold under many names – mine is a Gigaware. This is what lsusb shows:

ID 093a:2468 Pixart Imaging, Inc. Easy Snap Snake Eye WebCam

Ubuntu 7.10 includes the gspca driver which is supposed to handle this webcam, but doesn’t. A minor change needs to be made to the driver source to make it work.

First, open up a terminal.

Next, unplug your webcam and make sure the gspca module is not loaded with this command:
sudo rmmod gspca

Now download the gspca source code and the tools to build it with these commands:
sudo apt-get install gspca-source
sudo apt-get install build-essential

This will place the source code into the /usr/src directory.

Next, we go to that directory and expand the source with these commands:
cd /usr/src
sudo tar xvjf gspca-source.tar

Now we will download a patch and apply it to the source:
cd modules/gspca/Pixart
sudo wget http://www.vanbrunt.com/pac207.patch
sudo patch -p0 < pac207.patch

Finally, we will build and install the modified driver:
cd ..
sudo ./gspca_build

And that, my friend, should do the trick! I recommend trying it with Camorama:
sudo apt-get install camorama

Enjoy!!

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