Solved: Dell Vostro 1400 built-in webcam (Ubuntu 7.10)

Intro

Dell Vostro 1400 laptops can be configured with built-in webcam, which seems to be from Creative. I believe that 1500 and 1700 series come with same type of webcam. These instructions are compiled from couple of forums I found on the topic.

Symptoms

• Built-in webcam not recognized by Ubuntu 7.10 default setup

Solution

• Check if you have svn installed, if not add the "subversion" package with Synaptic or apt-get.
• Download svn trunk with command:
  svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk
• open file uvc_driver.c and insert the following code:
  /* after line 1661 */
  /* OmniVision OEM Dell Notebook */
  { .match_flags = USB_DEVICE_ID_MATCH_DEVICE
  | USB_DEVICE_ID_MATCH_INT_INFO,
  .idVendor = 0x05a9,
  .idProduct = 0x2640,
  .bInterfaceClass = USB_CLASS_VIDEO,
  .bInterfaceSubClass = 1,
  .bInterfaceProtocol = 0,
  .driver_info = UVC_QUIRK_PROBE_MINMAX },
• Compile and install by running the following commands in terminal. Be sure you are in the "trunk" folder while doing that:
  sudo make
  sudo make install
• Load driver with:
  sudo modprobe uvcvideo
  

After that the blue light (LED) next to your built-in cam will flash. You can check if the webcam works within Skype for example.

video group

To make the webcam available for other users, you need to make them members of the video group (I believe that the video group was created in the install step). On the Hardy Haron (8.04 LTS) this step was not needed. All the users had access to my webcam.

After the install process your webcam will be available after each boot automatically. I tested the webcam with Skype and aMSN.