By The best scenario for configuring a webcam is when you buy an external one. Numerous sites exist for different manufacturers and models, and a Web search can often tell you whether GNU/Linux supports a given webcam. In most cases, you probably won't find much information on the manufacturer's site, but you will generally find community-built sites, often complete with user comments. Howard Shane's, while showing its age in some ways, includes many useful links for consumers. For FireWire cameras, try, which is maintained by Damien Douxchamps.

An especially useful site is Michel Xhaard's, whose Spca5xx drivers are starting to find their way into the repositories of major distributions, including Debian. If your driver is listed on this site and your distribution includes packages for these drivers, then your webcam may be configurable automatically when the packages are installed, with little or no effort on your part. However, at times -- especially with a laptop -- you may be working with a built-in webcam that, chances are, was not your main consideration when you purchased, or with a distribution that doesn't include driver packages. In such cases, a Web search on your computer model may turn up information on how to set up the webcam. More often, you will have to obtain information about the camera directly from the computer.

You have several ways of doing so: • Test the camera using a suitable program (see below). If it works, then your camera is one of those directly supported by the kernel.

This scenario is uncommon today, but you might get lucky. • Use the command dmesg more to see whether the camera was detected during bootup. Should you find a reference to it, then search /lib/modules for the /usb subfolder and see if a loadable kernel module exists for it (you may have make a reasoned guess from among those listed). The exact position of this subfolder varies with the distribution; in Debian, it is /lib/modules/ kernel/build/drivers/usb, while in Fedora 7 it is /lib/modules/ kernel/kernel/drivers/usb. • These days, the most likely possibility is that you have a USB camera. Use lsusb or, if your distribution includes it, the graphical tool v4l2-tool to see a list of USB devices. Locate the camera through its name, a process of elimination, or guesswork, and record the eight-digit number with a colon in the middle in the last column of its listing.

This number identifies the vendor and product ID, which you can use to find a possible driver on the Internet. If you are using v4l2-tool, then entering the IDs on the Suggest Driver tab may even give you the name of a suggested driver. Armed with this information, you can search the Internet for the driver, then download and compile it. In some cases, you may have to download dependencies first.

For instance, for the Ricoh R5U870 driver, you will have to install a (DKMS) package as well. In the case of the Ricoh R5U870, having DKMS enabled means that the driver can be automatically installed as soon as it is successfully compiled.

Conceivably, you might have to install the driver via a kernel patch, although that should be rare unless you have an older webcam. Most of the time, when you have the driver ready, you will have to use modprobe drivermodulename to load it into the kernel. When you are satisifed that it works, add the driver name to /etc/modules or the line modprobe drivermodulename to /etc/rc.d/rc.local to enable the camera at boot time. Testing Having come this far, you are over the worst, but some difficulties may still be waiting in ambush as you prepare to test.

When viewing the Flash video streaming content in Firefox 2 (FF2) and Firefox 3. If you reinstall SL. 2017 My Digital Life. .my pc plays internet videos in slow motion. Try using other browsers like Mozilla Firefox. The information on Computing.Net is the opinions of its users.

Depending on the distribution, you may need to use the addgroup command to add a new video group, and to add user accounts to the group in /etc/group so that everybody can use the camera. Computer Ethics 3rd Edition By Deborah G Johnson Pdf Viewer on this page. In addition, you should test the webcam with a variety of programs, such as CamStream, Ekiga, and Kopete, because one of them may not work with your particular camera or its driver. In some cases, upgrading to a newer version of a program may suddenly give you support. If you use DKMS to install a webcam driver, you may find that another peripheral stops working (in my case, it was the wireless card enabled by ).

This problem may persist if you reboot, but miraculously vanish if you shut down the machine and restart. If it doesn't, uninstalling whatever has stopped working and reinstalling it may be a solution. Conclusion Unavoidably, this article provides only a starting point. Not only are webcams available in an overwhelming array of manufacturers and models, but many are rebrandings of other cameras sold under a different name, and individual cameras sold as the same model may differ internally. Nor, like many hardware makers, do the manufacturers of webcams show much interest in releasing GNU/Linux drivers.

That means that many of the drivers that exist are the work of community developers doing reverse engineering, many of whom seem never to have considered standardizing their work with that of others. For these reasons, many details have to be left to the particular camera and module. However, for many users, the problem is not that webcam configuration is difficult so much as the fact that they lack an overview. Perhaps with the resources and circumstances given here, you can start the process knowing what you might be in for, and, when one alternative fails, what other approaches you can try.

Mozilla is expanding development of Firefox for Android with new efforts to improve its performance, lower its power consumption, adapt it for tablets--and keep the browser maker relevant in the hottest area of computing. Firefox is the second-most widely used browser on computers, but things are different in the mobile arena. There, Firefox is at a serious disadvantage compared to mobile browsers such as Apple's Safari and Google's unbranded Android browser that are built into the operating systems. Mozilla, by comparison, must convince people or phone makers to install Firefox, and even then restrictions keep it off several mobile operating systems. But Mozilla clearly has recognized that mobile computing is rapidly expanding beyond the niche of technophiles and wealthy folks who want a high-status phone. Firefox won't have an easy time carving a place for itself on new mobile devices, but Mozilla is doing its darndest to build a browser that will attract users.

One illustration: When Mozilla programmer Dave Mandelin began an about what Firefox needs to run better on ARM processors, which dominate the phone and tablet market, a broad, active discussion took off. Mandelin wasn't very gentle. 'If you have a powerful device, Firefox performance is in many ways pretty good. But UI [user interface] responsiveness and memory usage seem to be in pretty bad shape,' Mandelin said. 'So we need to get better measurements and start improving performance in those areas, today.' And Mozilla, barred from bringing its browser to major mobile operating systems such as Apple's iOS and Microsoft's Windows Phone, is moving beyond browsers, too. 'Smartphones and tablets are where the next billion people will expect their personalized experience to be available to them anytime, anywhere,' Mozilla said in its that Mozilla Vice President of Products Jay Sullivan published earlier this year.

'To significantly affect Internet life in the future, we will have to deliver value on major OSes, whether we are allowed to ship our own browser engine or not.' Getting a Fennec foothold That operating system barrier has made it harder for Firefox for mobile, code-named Fennec, to gain a foothold.

The two initial operating systems for Fennec were Maemo from Nokia and Windows Mobile from Microsoft. Maemo became MeeGo when Nokia merged the effort with Intel's mobile Linux project, but through a major Nokia restructuring,. Microsoft, meanwhile, overhauled Windows Mobile 6.5 to produce Windows Phone 7--and one aspect of that shift is the. Another possible avenue, Research in Motion's BlackBerry operating system, doesn't look promising, either.

Although RIM started a closed beta test of a native developer kit (NDK) last week for BlackBerry tablets, the company told CNET in a statement that won't enable browsers such as Firefox, as it's currently engineered, on phones. 'We do not have any plans to bring an NDK to the BlackBerry OS today,' the company said in a statement.

'It would have to be written in Java to run on our platform. Opera, Bolt, and other browsers have been ported to the BlackBerry smartphone platform to date.' The fact that Firefox runs in part as a native code on a smartphone's hardware rather than on higher-level layer such as the Java-like interface of Android raises programming challenges.

Mozilla has a With Apple barring any browser from iOS that doesn't use the operating system's own built-in WebKit engine, Android is far and away Firefox's biggest hope. Even there, though, Mozilla will have to persuade people to install and use Firefox. To get try get ahead, Mozilla could follow in Opera's footsteps by getting companies to preinstall the browser.

'Mozilla is certainly interested in working with OEMs [original equipment manufacturers such as phone makers] and others who share our vision,' the company said. Such partners typically are more motivated by financial self-interest than Mozilla's vision of an open Web, though. And they'd have to be assured that customers wouldn't be confused, unhappy, or hampered by even more mobile browsing incompatibilities than they'd otherwise experience. Pushing for Android One measurement Mozilla is watching is.

There, reviews are generally favorable with an average rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, but that trails the Dolphin Browser HD, Opera Mobile, and Opera Mini, all of which get 4.5 stars. For Firefox on Android,. Another is lack of support for Adobe Systems' Flash Player, a browser plug-in that's widely used on desktop computers but not on mobile devices. A feature coming to the next version of Firefox for Android: the ability to copy and paste text. Mozilla Mozilla is tackling the problems, though--and it's bringing its six-week rapid-release development process, too, so changes should come steadily and frequently. The next version, Firefox 7 for mobile devices, brings a for Web programmers and the for users.

One area where people can expect improvement is power consumption to increase battery life. 'Mozilla is looking for both volunteers and potential paid employees who are experienced at measuring and tuning power usage on small devices,' said Mozilla programmer Benjamin Smedberg in a earlier this month. Another area is user interface. Firefox for Android has gradually dovetailed better with Android's own interface, and a big priority now is to improve it for Android tablets. Development speed is potentially a big advantage over Android's stock browser, which has moved comparatively slowly and, unlike Google's Gmail and Google Maps applications, hasn't been broken out of the operating system as an app that can be updated through the Anrdoid Market. 'Android WebKit is the closest thing to being the IE6 of mobile development for me,' said Web developer and browser expert Dion Almaer in a, referring to the decade-old but still widely used version of Internet Explorer that Web programmers loathe.

'So many people are on old fragmented versions of Android, so you still have to support the old stuff which is ripe with issues that raise their nasty head at every turn.' Firefox's cold start Unfortunately for Mozilla, though, Firefox is at an inherent disadvantage compared to the stock Android browser because of the way the mobile operating system manages scarce memory. When more memory is needed, idle applications get pushed out of active memory. But according to, the WebKit browser engine used in Android's stock browser is essentially kept in memory by 'all Android appications,' keeping it in active memory. When Firefox gets bumped out, loading a Web page requires reloading the browser into memory. That 'cold start' means Firefox users on Android are treated to the browser's splash screen while it loads into memory again, something that's begun to pain Michael Verdi, a support content manager at Mozilla.

'The vast majority of my interactions with a browser on my phone is following a link from e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, or any number of apps,' Verdi said in a. 'If Firefox has to cold start it's painful.

And the thing is, it has to cold start all of the time. I can't tell you how many times a day I see that logo (6? It's making me start to hate the logo.' Verdi posted a that shows how much slower Firefox is than the stock Android browser at loading a page--16.9 seconds vs. 7.5 seconds on his HTC Desire HD.

Mark Finkle of making sure Fennec purges as much data from its memory cache as possible so that the browser is less likely to be evicted from memory. Bigger ambitious Clearly, it's not a simple task bringing Firefox to the mobile market. The organization is trying another efforts that's arguably even more challenging: an entire mobile operating system. Aims to produce a mobile phone operating system that boots straight to a Web browser. That browser comes with enough programming interfaces to match what native mobile apps can do today--dialing the phone, for example. Under the covers, it runs a. Apps, though, are Web apps, not those that run on Linux or Android's Java-esque environment.

Getting users or phone makers to adopt such software seems like it'll be an even harder challenge than getting them to adopt Firefox for Android. But Mozilla can be a healthy influence on the industry even when its products don't become dominant.