joe user wrote:
--- "Paul W. Morehead" <paulm53@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
Time to do some surfing and reading. Here's some
places to start:
Hello Paul. I actually have spent most of the day
looking at those sites, and I just can't figure out
why the device isn't detecting. dmesg shows that it
detects the device is plugged in, but no program that
I can run seems to connect to it. I am baffled. Any
ideas on how to do some simple diagnostics to see if
the right module is loading, the correct /dev/video?
is being created, and then some kind of camera display
program links to it? I have a sneaky feeling that all
this stuff would work much better under SuSE, but I'm
stuck on RH for now.
Cool! I get a second chance at this! Well, here are my disclaimers:
I'm definately not a Linux guru, and I don't use RH9, but those who know
this stuff better have busier lives than I do, so since I've learned a
fair bit being a newbie at v4l stuff, lemme see what I can offer.
For starters, knowing which module works for your cameras depends much
more on the vendor/product ID numbers than the name given by the
marketing folks. Actually it really depends on the chipsets, but
usually the vendors will change the productID when they change a
chipset. This info can be gotten from dmesg, I use dmesg | grep "vend"
but if the usb driver sees the device and just doesn't know which module
to load for it, you'll find a line somewhat like this:
usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0x50d/0x208) is not claimed by any active
driver.
For the PROeX cam, it should be 0x041E, 0x4011, and if it is, then the
pwc.o driver is the one you wanna use for that camera. Check lsmod. Is
pwc listed? If so, then the correct module is, in fact, loaded and
ready to go. Otherwise you could "modprobe pwc" and I think you might
need to, because if I remember the last time I had my Logitech plugged
in on boot, RH8 didn't automagically go and load the pwc module for me.
Once it's loaded, you could check to see if v4l is happy by trying
v4l-info. If you get a "open /dev/video0: No such device" then your
problems are probably out of my league. Hopefully, you'll get a long
happy output from v4l telling you about the camera, at which point you
should be able to use something like xawtv to see the camera's output
(your smiling face of victory, no doubt) with little effort.
You're on your own with the other (NX) camera until someone more
knowledgeable steps forward, because I couldn't find anything on that
specific model in the few minutes I spent surfing. But on that topic,
and referring back to the suggested "smart-questions.html" reading, it
would be a lot easier to help you out if you could include things like
the lines from dmesg (if there are any) specific to usb devices, or the
output from v4l-info, or stuff from /proc/bus/usb/devices (edited a bit
to keep the posting concise) rather than just stating that the camera is
"not detecting," which really doesn't tell us much. The fact is, the
PROeX camera--at least--should work, so unless you have buggy hardware,
it's probably a pretty simple matter to get it working. Simple enough
that you'd probably figure it out on your own given time, but also
simple enough that a wee bit more concrete diagnostic info in your post
would make the problem simple enough for one of the much busier and more
experienced folk out there spend a moment or two to give you the golden key.
(...but I will say that I share your sneaky feeling about SuSE, at least
as far as out-of-box ease goes: I plugged my old Aiptek Pencam in on a
SuSE system and up popped an icon on the desktop. Schweet. I'm just
too comfortable with the rest of RH to switch, at least at this point.
Don't give up...)
-p
