Webcams are notorious for their lack of support under Linux. But thanks to GSPCA, many webcams now have functional V4L drivers. This tutorial covers the building, installation, and configuration of the GSPCA drivers, including how to adjust color balance and brightness directly at the kernel module level.

Webcams are everywhere these days: they're standard on a lot of laptops, LCD monitors are starting to incorporate them, and decent standalone USB webcams can be had for less than $40. In this two-part series we'll set up a Webcam on Linux, and then use it to perform a number of amazing and fun tasks.

A LONE HOBBYIST programmer sitting at his home in France is responsible for adding 235 USB webcams to the list of those supported by Linux.

This week in our whirlwind tour of the Linux.com forums: demystifying your notebook's built-in webcam, demystifying the varying states of system RAM, and demystifying the ins and outs of running a shared server.

According to a thread on the Linux uvcvideo driver mailing list if everything goes well we will see it included in the 2.6.27 kernel!

Building a MythTV digital video recorder (DVR) is a series of small battles -- configuring digital sound, aligning your video sources and channel guide data, getting XvMC running, and so on. Any tool that simplifies one of those battles is welcome, and GNOME LIRC Properties promises to be just such a tool.

Skype recently released Skype 2.0 beta for Linux, which includes the ability to make video calls, a feature the Windows and Mac versions have had for some time. I tried the beta on two systems running Ubuntu 7.10 -- my desktop PC with a USB webcam and a MacBook Pro with its onboard iSight webcam -- with mixed results.

I have an old noname cheapo webcam, that I dusted out of my junk (why? More on that in a post coming soon). I hoped that it would work in my Ubuntu setup out of the box like most of my other hardware. I connected it to my laptop’s usb port. dmesg gave the following output

Configuring GNU/Linux does not end when the installation CD ejects, nor even after the post-install wizard runs. While installation leaves you with a basic system, it does not leave you with an optimized system in which all your preferences and requirements have been taken into account.