Alex Hixon’s Blog

Good to see the Banshee crew push out a new release from the 0.13 series. Few minor improvements which make things a bit nicer, but generally Banshee ‘trunk’ is going to be the big one.

The new Last.fm playlist source is absolutely smashing. Cheers to Gabriel Burt for that. Last.fm the way it was meant to be.

Yes, it’s that damn good. Why else would I bother to blog?

r5u870 is a terrific little driver written by Sam Revitch that provides support for Ricoh R5U870 webcams.
The original driver itself supports the following devices:

05ca:1810 HP Pavilion Webcam - UVC
05ca:1830 Sony Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC2 (for VAIO SZ)
05ca:1832 Sony Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC3 (for VAIO UX)
05ca:1833 Sony Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC2 (for VAIO AR1)
05ca:1834 Sony Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC2 (for VAIO AR2)
05ca:1835 Sony Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC5 (for VAIO SZ)
05ca:1836 Sony Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC4 (for VAIO FE)
05ca:1870 HP Pavilion Webcam / HP Webcam 1000

Now, since the kernel doesn’t come with this driver, I couldn’t use my webcam on my laptop. Sucky.
After a bit of researching, I found that this appeared to be the driver I needed. So, I clicked on the link to download the driver off Sam’s website (http://lsb.blogdns.net/ry5u870/ via the Wayback Machine). Guess what? The site’s down. Damn.

After a bit of peeking around in different places, I managed to download a .deb from here and took the source from the upstream/ directory inside. Haha, now I had the source.

I installed the linux-headers-2.6.xxx package (kernel-source on OpenSUSE 10.3; they’re headers package doesn’t work AFAIK) and compiled. Success! Go-go-gadget modprobe. The module loaded OK, but the driver didn’t detect my webcam. I went back and checked the original device support list - my device wasn’t there. It was actually a VGP-VCC7 (05ca:183a), which wasn’t built into the driver. Another quick Google sent me here. Ah hah, so I needed to patch the driver so it could support my device, and extract the firmware from the original driver.

After I had applied the patch, and got the firmware going, I compiled and installed. Finally, it seemed to have worked!
I fired gstreamer-properties and tried to test the video input - it failed. After installing xawtv, I ran it and see what came up - my webcam. Apparently it doesn’t like being run through GStreamer, which sucks, ’cause that’s where Cheese is at.

So, I spent the rest of the weekend debugging, and compiling, and debugging…

At the end, I came up with this: r5u870 0.10.1. And it works! See? (please don’t ask what happened to my eye, I must’ve been blinking at the same time, or something.. =)

r5u870 0.10.1 is actually modified version of the original device driver, that has several advantages:

• Properly implements V4L version 1 query functions. While version 1 has been obsoleted, it’s still necessary to have support for it as a number of apps still use it, including GStreamer’s v4lsrc element (v4l2src is on the way, I believe it’s in gst-plugins-bad at the moment).
• Native support for VGP-VCC7, including supplied microcode.
• Can compile against Linux kernels 2.6.24+. OpenSUSE 11.0 Alpha 0 uses this at the moment, I expect more distros to start using it sooner or later.

If you want to download or contribute, head over to it’s wiki page. I should probably note I’m merely the maintainer of the driver until Sam comes back from the null void, if that happens. I might attempt to get this into the current kernel tree, too.

Possibly a sign of things to come: mediati.org (all but SVN), ayhja.com and few other domains with client hosting were down, needed to login to Plesk to manually restart the VPS. Apparently had been like that the majority of the day.
Great. Just great.

from a new Sony VAIO VGN-SZ56GN (aka SZ110 or something later, I’m sure).
Very sexy, just installed Debian. Basically everything but wireless worked out of the box (had to install a kernel module, just a simple apt-get).

Edit: OK, so I lied. Not everything worked as well as I had hoped:

• Had to install the icky NVIDIA driver (and kernel-headers, etc..).
• Create an init script to switch between the Intel and NVIDIA xorg.conf files depending on what the switch was set to on boot.
• Update ALSA kernel modules, so that the PC speaker would mute itself when I plugged headphones in. Haven’t testing the microphone yet, but I suspect that’s been fixed too. Debian came with 1.0.14, and this was fixed in 1.0.15rc3 (which has been released). Also needed to force the vaio version of the driver. A newer version of ALSA has been uploaded by the Debian ALSA maintainers and is waiting to be accepted into sid.
• ACPI events via sony-pi are buggered - need to apply a patch so that the laptop gets detected correctly instead of falling back to an incorrect default. Either that, or use sony-laptop, I forget. (This appears to be patched in the latest kernel release - will get back to you on this one).
• A patch exists to make the Motioneye Camera on this machine appear at /dev/video0, so that other apps can access the webcam, but I haven’t tried nor bothered to get it working yet. I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually, but it’s not really high priority for me at the moment. (Note: might be fixed by getting the above issue resolved)
• Cannot easily adjust backlight values. If I’m running on the Intel graphics adapter, I can jump into gnome-terminal/xterm/whatever, and run xbacklight -set 50; the NVIDIA card does not have an obviously apparent way to adjust the backlight brightness - it can adjust the screen brightness, but this does not equate to less power used. Using the screen brightness applet causes it to crash. (Related to sony-pi driver).
• Haven’t tried out the fingerprint reader, but I suspect I’ll need to install a driver or two to get that working properly too.

The amount of custom hardware on this machine makes the software issue worse than most other brands though; but the machine itself is pretty hard to beat - nice and light, long battery life, looks good, feature-full, and a full-sized keyboard.

I did also manage to remove the “Windows Vista(tm)” sticker; pretty damn hard mind you.

Edit x2: More detailed information will now live here forever.