Unfortunately our guide called Enabling a webcam under Ubuntu does not work for my Logitech QuickCam Messenger Communicate web camera, because the model is no supported by SPCA. Moreover this webcam is not UVC standard compliant as shown by the Logitech QuickCam Team´s non-UVC list. You can find your webcam on the list by searching for the product id (PID) of your webcam. The command line program lsusb can help you with this as shown in Figure 1. 0x046d is the manufacturer id of Logitech and 0x08f5 is the product id of my Logitech QuickCam Messenger Communicate webcam.

Figure 1: Use lsusb to find out the model number of your webcam

I tested the following things on Xubuntu Linux 8.10. All things explained here are based on several forums all over the internet, but mainly this UbuntuForums.og thread helped me a lot. Let's start, shall we?

You have to download three files: the driver-source (yes we have to compile it!) and two patches for the source code. Because I don't like to link to external pages, when it comes to necessary resources, you need to save the following files to let's say the /tmp folder.

• qc-usb-messenger-1.8.tar.gz (You may check for a newer version on the author´s site. If you do patch2 might not work!)
• patch.txt (You may check for a newer version on the author´s site too. If you do patch2 might not work!)
• patch2.txt (thanks go to TheDebugger on ubuntuforums.org)

Now start a terminal and enter the following lines. This is going to extract the driver sources and apply the two patches to it, that are necessary to prevent error messages and thence a successful compilation. Moreover the first patch alters the source code of the driver to support our camera model, since the source code is actually for different Logitech QuickCam models.

cd /tmp
tar xzvf qc-usb-messenger-1.8.tar.gz
patch -p0 < patch.txt
patch -p0 < patch2.txt

Now we have to compile the driver. I assume that you have gcc (the GNU C Compiler) installed. Actually we don't have to compile this by ourselves with make. There is a script that does all this for us. So, start it ...

cd /qc-usb-messenger-1.8
./quickcam.sh

The script asks a lot of questions. What I did is keep hitting ENTER (well, sometimes it asked for the root password though) until it was all over. It said things about I should quit, because several required programs are not installed, but in the end everything was fine. If this does not work for you - like your PC crashes; which this script tells you it can - please consult the ubuntuforums.org thread mentioned above.

After the script is finished you should have a new device under /dev called video0. Applications like Camorama (which I used to test the webcam) work with this device to access the webcam. Figure 2 shows a screenshot of Camorama on my computer.

Figure 2: Camorama reads images from the Logitech QuickCam Messenger Communicate webcam

If you have a device called /dev/video0 and Camorama tells you that there is no such device, there is probably something wrong with the permissions of the device. Figure 3 shows the permissions as well as the user and group owning the device on my computer.

Figure 3: The group video owns the /dev/video0 device

The safest thing to do is, to add the users that want to use the camera to the group called video. In my case (user bkm) this is done using the following command:

sudo adduser bkm video

I hope this works for you too and if not, let me wish you good luck on finding a solution for your webcam.