In a desperate attempt to distract myself from the chaotic going-ons of life, I took up the gargantuan task of deploying the OwlCam. As some of you may know, I haven’t had any success with the qc-usb kernel module since my FC1 days. The damned driver /never/ works under Debian, for some odd reason. Meh.

So I decided that rambo was going to be given a purpose. I broke the camera out, along with my box of distro install discs. After an hour or two of beating with the FC1 disc, I gave up on the easy route. I popped my Trustix disc in and watched the installer boot.

I shortly found out why more memory is a good thing, and why TSL isn’t a very popular distro.

The installer was shoddy, to say the least. I couldn’t manage to get my swap partition active on account of there being no harddrive in /dev, so I was stuck with something like 33mb of ram (less? more? I can’t remember what rambo has in it, and I can’t be arsed to check). If I tried anything more than the minimum amount of packages, the installer would run out of core and decombust in a rather ugly fasion.

First, half of the screen would turn red. Then ‘Signal 11 error caught’ messages (and a few of the dreaded ‘SEGFAULT’ messages) would pop on to the red, along with some other things about the system shutting down. After a few unmounts, it would spit the disc out, half way through an installer.

Not a pleasent thing.

So I did the minimum install and put the developer tools I would be needed on by hand (rpm -i /mnt/cdrom/trustix/rpms/blablabla.rpm). Deps suck, they really do. This reminded me why I use Debian.

After getting my developer tools set, I installed and configured my kernel source. Then I downloaded the code for zawtv (a video package for linux) and qc-usb (the module that supports my webcam) and began compiling shit. zawtv was rather simple, just a few libs needed to be installed from the cd.

Qc-usb, on the other hand…

Well, I didn’t have everything I needed in terms of kernel support. So I made the v4l modules and crap. I force it to load, despite a kernel version mismatch (minor problem, shouldn’t break anything, I think), then the qc-usb driver.

They both load. But the qc-usb driver doesn’t take ownership of the camera.

=/