This post was extracted from here. I copied gspcav1-20071224.tar.gz and gspcapatch.gz in my website as a mirror. This method doesn’t work in Fedora 11 yet. I’m searching how to do it. I wrote a post with another method that works very well. As Filippo said, this post is obsolete.
I tried to get my mother-in-law’s QuickCam E2500 working in Ubuntu 9.04. I used actionshrimp.com’s tutorial, and did my best to apply it to Ubuntu 9.04. Below are the details (I got it working, but with high CPU utilization).
Downloaded files:
wget http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca50x/Download/gspcav1-20071224.tar.gz
http://www.actionshrimp.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/gspcapatch.gz
Extract files:
gzip -d gspcapatch.gz
tar -xvf gspcav1-20071224.tar.gz
Applied patch to driver source:
sudo apt-get install patch (didn’t have patch)
cd gspcav1-20071224
patch < ../gspcapatch
Build src:
sudo ./gspca_build
Deal with existing module:
sudo rmmod gspca
sudo mv /lib/modules/2.6.28-11-generic/kernel/drivers/usb/media/gspca.ko /lib/modules/2.6.28-11-generic/kernel/drivers/usb/media/gspca.ko.orig
Install new module:
sudo mv gspca.ko /lib/modules/2.6.28-11-generic/kernel/drivers/usb/media/gspca.ko
sudo modprobe gspca
Skype did not find the camera (no video devices were found). However, when launching Skype as root, the camera was indeed found. The video test worked (was slow to come up), and the video was extremely dark.
Brighten image:
Created /etc/modprobe.d/gspca.conf and wrote the following to the file: options gspca gamma=1 autoexpo=0
sudo rmmod gspca
sudo modprobe gspca
Lauching Skype again as root and testing video gave me an image with much better exposure.
gstfakevideo:
sudo apt-get install subversion (didn’t have svn)
svn checkout http://gstfakevideo.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ gstfakevideo
cd gstfakevideo
sudo apt-get install libgstreamer0.10-dev (needed this to get gstreamer-0.10.pc)
make
sudo mv /dev/video0 /dev/video1
sudo chmod a+rw /dev/video1
gstfakevideo v4lsrc device=/dev/video1 ! ffmpegcolorspace
This basically didn’t work – I couldn’t get any video devices to come up in Skype. So I’m stopping now and just dealing with the high CPU usage 
Samuel Iglesias is a free software and Open source Hardware supporter. He is working as Linux device driver developer at Igalia, a free software company located in A Coruña, Spain.
gspcav1 is unsupported and unmaintained. There is no sane reason to keep manually compiling it nor applying patches on top of it.
This webcam is supported upstream since http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb/rev/3783d17e1216 and has been backported in jaunty since kernel 2.6.28-13.44, just enable jaunty-updates and it should work out of the box.
Don’t know about fedora 11 but if not there yet it’s a trivial patch and you shouldn’t have any difficulty in getting it merged, just open a bug.
Thank you Filippo! I used the upstream driver… and it works!
I’ll write a new post using this method.
I follow fedora planet not to learn about ubuntu but about Fedora. Keep your ubuntu post out of fedora planet. I don’t contribute for fedora but simple user, however if you are not a fedora developer, get out of fedora planet, let users like me learn about fedora.
I am a Fedora Ambassador from Spain. I do the best for free software and I usually share every knowledge I learnt because it can be useful for someone. Some posts about other distributions can help out to Fedora.
For example, this post I tried these steps in ubuntu and in Fedora, but for the latter doesn’t work. However, Filippo read it and helped me to find another driver that actualy works in Fedora, as I posted later.
But you are right, I just change my RSS settings to only appear fedora-related posts in Fedora Planet.
Thanks for your comment!
Glad I’ve been helpful, there are a lot of crappy howtos out there about webcam drivers but most of them are obsolete. Thanks to the great work fro Hans de Goede with gspca drivers and libv4l, now almost everything just works with upstream drivers.
Dear people,
you’re all doing great and undervalued work. So maybe you can also help me. My little e2500 eyeball still doesn’t function properly. It works totally fine with cheese (although it keeps reporting JPEG decompression errors), but in Skype I get nothing but trouble.
All green lines and the video from the other person stops, and sometimes skype crashes.
Before the driver was integrated into the kernel I tried some stuff with the manual patches which used to work yet unsatisfactory. Is it possible that some rubbish from those attempts is still bugging my jaunty system?
thanks, fje
I was told to use this command:
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype
I`m using Fedora 10 with E2500, and all works.
I just update kernel to 2.6.29 from testing repositories. Hm, but it badly works without video drivers:)
P.S. sorry for my english