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.
# lsusbBus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000Bus 002 Device 003: ID 093a:2470 Pixart Imaging, Inc.Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000Bus 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!