Sony Vaio motion eye webcam Ricoh in Intrepid?

[Sealbhach]

I never got this working in Hardy and I heard there was better support for webcams in Intrepid.

It needs the Ricoh driver r5u870 but according to this site

http://www.palmix.org/r5u870-en.html

there is no working driver for the 2.6.27 kernel.

I was wondering how other Vaio owners have been affected by this?


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[Boss_scout]

I am using a Sony vaio VGN-FZ38M, Intel Core 2 T8100, 4GB, 200GB HDD, NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT GPU.
My integrated webcam is operating correctly using Cheese under 8.10 and did so under 8.04. Unfortunately i do not know the details of the webcam but it does work.

[Sealbhach]

Bump, anyone got any news on getting a driver for Intrepid?


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[p.i.m.p]

BUMP ditto - need the driver for intrepid... hate having to boot windows just to use the webcam

@sealbach actually it was pretty simple to install the webcam in hardy.. they just haven't released a compatible driver for intrepid. this is a shame though.. i might have to downgrade to hardy just because of this bug

[pihhan]

There is firmware loader for this camera, which might or may be not enough. See http://www.bitbucket.org/ahixon/r5u87x/, please try it and report success or problems for your model. It does not work for me, but you might be lucky one. Webcam claims to support USB Video standard, which would work with uvcvideo driver after firmware loading. YMMV

Original driver is at http://wiki.mediati.org/R5u870 I cannot get there right now, but you might be able to use webcam, if you get 2.6.25 kernel or upgrade the driver to support newer kernels.

[p.i.m.p]

There is firmware loader for this camera, which might or may be not enough. See http://www.bitbucket.org/ahixon/r5u87x/, please try it and report success or problems for your model. It does not work for me, but you might be lucky one. Webcam claims to support USB Video standard, which would work with uvcvideo driver after firmware loading. YMMV

Original driver is at http://wiki.mediati.org/R5u870 I cannot get there right now, but you might be able to use webcam, if you get 2.6.25 kernel or upgrade the driver to support newer kernels.

omg it worked like a charm first time around without any problems.. thank you so much.. really appreciate it

[Sealbhach]

YAY!! Worked like a charm. Didn't even need the driver. Had to reboot for it to take effect. Works in Cheese and Skype, but not in Camorama. In Ekiga it detects light but the image is all bugged out.


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[cake_or_death]

Hi.
This may be a silly question. I'm running 8.10 on my Vaio vgn-cr290. I'd like to try the firmware fix mentioned above at http://www.bitbucket.org/ahixon/r5u87x/, but I'm not sure how to install or apply the settings once I've downloaded the files. Can I get a quick step-by-step from somebody?

[p.i.m.p]

Download the source as a zip file from the link and extract the folder in it to you r home directory. Then start a terminal from the applications menu and navigate to the folder you just created. Installing the source is simple:

make
sudo ./loader
sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo
sudo modprobe uvcvideo

The catch is that these steps have to repeated every time you power off your computer so you can save them as a script file which can be done from the terminal as:

gedit camera_load.bash

Paste the following:

#!/bin/bash
cd /home/[username]/r5u87x-f24553d56d3e
./loader
modprobe -r uvcvideo
modprobe uvcvideo

Now make this file executable as:
chmod +x camera_load.bash

Now, every time you want to load the camera firmware just type:
"sudo camera_load.bash" from your home directory.

[Sealbhach]

The catch is that these steps have to repeated every time you power off your computer so you can save them as a script file which can be done from the terminal as:

gedit camera_load.bash

Paste the following:

#!/bin/bash
cd /home/[username]/r5u87x-f24553d56d3e
./loader
modprobe -r uvcvideo
modprobe uvcvideo

Now make this file executable as:
chmod +x camera_load.bash

Now, every time you want to load the camera firmware just type:
"sudo camera_load.bash" from your home directory.

Good idea! I was just wondering if you could add that command to Startup Sessions? I have a Conky script that starts up that way, but it doesn't require sudo.


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