Roland's blog

I have a webcam on my laptop but even though I tried enabling all modules in kernel 2.6.32, I wasn't able to get the system to recognize my webcam.

Finally, I found out about this project: http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/#devices and finally I got it to work.

You need mercurial source control for the source:

cd /usr/src
hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/~pinchartl/uvcvideo/
cd uvcvideo
make
make install

Edit either /etc/modprobe.conf (Ubuntu) or /etc/conf.d/modules (Gentoo) to add the kernel module.

Use something like "cheese" to test your webcam.

On the other hand, reading about privacy online, you may want to disable the automatic modprobe until you need it. :)