Getting Acer Orbicam to work with Linux

With the new gspca driver from Michael Xhaard, this camera works fine with linux.

To install the driver you will need either to have your distribution's default kernel and the kernel-source or kernel-headers package installed, or have a custom kernel installed with it's sources lying around. Your linux kernel version must be >= 2.6.11

Get the driver from here. Find the gspca driver and download it. The latest gspca driver at this moment (10/01/2007) is this.

Extract the tarball somewhere, enter the directory that you just extracted and type these commands:

$ make
$ su
# make install
# modprobe gspca

Now open your favorite V4L application and try it. Kopete works fine with it. Note that applications that are already running may not see the orbicam until you restart them.

Known Problem: Turning the orbicam around doesn't flip the image upside down, so if you try to look behind the screen with the camera, everything will show upside down.

To make the driver load automatically at startup, do the following:

• In debian, edit /etc/modules and add a line saying: gspca
• In openSuSE, edit /etc/init.d/boot.local and add a line saying: modprobe gspca
• In gentoo, edit /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 and add a line saying: gspca

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