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Well, a long planned project was completed - I’m so lazy -, I wanted to monitor home when away. I had a dusty old Logitech QuickCam Pro (gray ring), that I tried to get working with my gentoo box for some time, without luck. In fact none of the existing drivers seem to support it.

So I went to the nearest supermarket which has some IT department and checked out the choice. There were mainly Labtech and Genius products, some on SALE. After a little googling form my mobile, I’ve found on Linux-USB device overview the list of the list of webcams.

Soon I found a match with one of the items on SALE: Genius GF112. It costed HUF 3490 (approximately 22 bucks).

Came home, unpacked the stuff and plugged the cam to a free USB slot, then did an lsusb to verify the device came up - everything went as expected.

# lsusb

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Bus 002 Device 003: ID 093a:2470 Pixart Imaging, Inc.

Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

I could get down to the drivers. The driver listing specified the gspca driver, so I esearched it. There were two matches:

# esearch gspca
[ Results for search key : gspca ]
[ Applications found : 2 ]

*  media-video/gspca [ Masked ]

      Latest version available: 01.00.10

      Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]

      Size of downloaded files: [no/bad digest]

      Homepage:    http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html

      Description: gspca driver for webcams.

      License:     GPL-2

*  media-video/gspcav1 [ Masked ]

      Latest version available: 20071224

      Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]

      Size of downloaded files: [no/bad digest]

      Homepage:    http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html

      Description: gspcav1 driver for webcams.

      License:     GPL-2

As the packages are masked, I used autounmask to allow emerging them. In fact media-video/gspca fails to install:

 * Messages for package media-video/gspca-01.00.10:

 * The package maintainer made a mistake.  You should consider using media-video/gspcav1
 * instead.  This driver is still alpha.  --KingTaco

, so I ended up emerging media-video/gspcav1.

When emerge was complete, I did #modprobe gspca.

Earlier I have emerged gqcam, so did a quick check with it:

#gqcam -v /dev/video0

There was my living room on my desktop… But no champagne yet, it’s just on my screen, not on any screen I want…

Next thing was to install a motion-detector: I figured motion will suit my needs. Did esearch that one too, of course masked, but exists… So autounmasked and emerged it.

Some tweaking of the /etc/monit.conf and /etc/conf.d/monit files (I’ll post later) and it was good to go, posting files into a local folder under my apache’s directory tree (well, symlinked to be exact).

There are a few steps remaining, such as archiving, syncing to another server, but for the moment I have to go cut the grass…

Enjoy!

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