How to get Logitech QuickCam Ultra Vision working in Ubuntu

I have recently removed Windows from my Dell Inspiron 9400, and replaced it with Ubuntu, which is a flavour of Linux (or GNU/Linux if you’re picky).

I was surprised at how easy the installation was, almost everything worked out of the box, wireless, all the media keys and 95% of the fn keys. (I’m having trouble with fn+f8 and fn+10 not working correctly)

Anyway I am very happy with the Installation, I love the effects you have on the windows, it looks really pretty.

I wanted to get my Logitech QuickCam Ultra Vision working with Ubuntu, so I could use it on Skype. I plugged it in and nothing happened…ho hum… on windows it would have picked it up and installed it, and asked for the driver cd, but anyway, after a bit of googling around I found this thread, and I followed the advise of Andrew Barber on there.

Make sure first you have all the tools for the job:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` linux-restricted-modules-`uname -r` build-essential subversion

Once you have got all them you will need to use subversion to get the driver from the svn repo..
svn checkout http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/linux-uvc/
Then you need to compile and install
cd linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk

make

sudo make install

Plug the camera in and take a look at dmesg. It may [hopefully] give you the device listing for it... eg /dev/video1
Point your application at that device and see if it works.
I checked dmseg to see what had happened...
$ dmesg | grep -i vid

[ 0.000000] BIOS-provided physical RAM map:

[ 8.445959] Boot video device is 0000:00:02.0

[ 26.441798] input: Video Bus as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/device:00/PNP0A03:00/device:2b/LNXVIDEO:00/input/input7

[ 26.489145] ACPI: Video Device [VID] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no)

[ 26.497079] input: Video Bus as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/device:00/PNP0A03:00/LNXVIDEO:01/input/input8

[ 26.537089] ACPI: Video Device [VID1] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no)

[ 26.537246] input: Video Bus as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/device:00/PNP0A03:00/LNXVIDEO:02/input/input9

[ 26.585000] ACPI: Video Device [VID2] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no)

[ 2902.096243] Linux video capture interface: v2.00

[ 2902.175522] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device <unnamed> (046d:08c9)

[ 2902.189674] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo

[ 2902.189683] USB Video Class driver (v0.1.0)
After that it worked in skype, I needed to set the sound in device to be the microphone of the web cam in the options of skype...
Sound In: USB Device 0x46d:0x8c9 (hw:U0x46d0x8c9,0)

Sound Out: Default device(default)

Ringing: Default device(default)

and in the video settings of skype...
Select webcam: UVC Camera (0x46d:0x8c9) (/dev/video0)

I am still currently having a weird issue where it seems that skype takes over the sound of all other applications. If I try and play some music after a skype call then it won't play until I reboot. Also it seems I'm allowed a max of 1 skype call before the sound in skype doesn't work, and therefore doesn't let me make or receive anymore calls. Again it only seems at the moment that a reboot will fix it. For the moment I will live with this as I don't use skype that often anyway. (If anyone has any advice for this part please leave a comment)
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