This article shows you how easy it is to enable a webcam under (X)ubuntu. Please check whether your webcam is supported first: click here.

Many users might be sceptical and suppose that this task requires editing of configuration files and resolving of endless packet dependencies. I assure you: it is EASY!

You start by downloading the GSPCA and preferrably the SPCAGUI tarball (these are two compressed TAR files with the file-extension .tar.gz) into a temporary folder of your choice. After that you open a terminal window and unpack the archives:

cd downloads/
tar xvzf gspcav1-20071224.tar.gz
tar xvzf spcagui20060127.tar.gz

Now you have two directories within your downloads folder. Enter the first GSPCA directory and build the package by executing:

cd gspcav1-20071224/
sudo ./gspca_build

Note: You need super-user rights to build the package.

Before you continue with installing the SPCAGUI software, you should make sure that the libsdl1.2-dev and libsdl-image1.2-dev is installed. Do this using the Synaptic package manager or by executing:

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev
sudo apt-get install libsdl-image1.2-dev

You are almost done! The last step is to build the SPCAGUI software from the downloaded sources. Change the directory to that of the extracted SPCAGUI archive and build it:

cd spcagui20060127/
make
sudo make install

Wait for the building process to finish. After that you can start the webcam GUI software by executing "spcagui".

Note: The contents of the download folder are not required any more. You may clean them now.

Figure 1 shows the console output of the SPCAGUI application on startup. Figure 2 shows the application in action (that's me on the screenshot ;-).

Figure 1: startup output information of the SPCAGUI application

Figure 2: SPCAGUI in live action!