20090628 logitech communicate stx on centos 53 - plembo/onemoretech GitHub Wiki

title: Logitech Communicate STX on CentOS 5.3 link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/06/28/logitech-communicate-stx-on-centos-53/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 296 created: 2009/06/28 17:38:15 created_gmt: 2009/06/28 17:38:15 comment_status: open post_name: logitech-communicate-stx-on-centos-53 status: publish post_type: post

Logitech Communicate STX on CentOS 5.3

Getting the Logitech Communicate STX usb webcam to work on Centos 5.3 actually turned out to be more work than I anticipated, although as you’ll see not so much as it could have been.

This webcam worked out of the box under Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04 and Fedora 11.

Because it uses an earlier kernel version, 2.6.18, CentOS 5 (like its upstream parent, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5), is missing some of the newer gee-whiz kernel multimedia features. In addition, stock CentOS kernels are configured identically to upstream, and so have many things turned off such as the ieee1394 drivers.

In preparing to enable any multimedia application on CentOS that requires hardware drivers I always start out by installing the latest centosplus kernel, which comes with everything “turned on”. To make sure this doesn’t get overwritten on the next “yum upgrade” I put the following lines into CentOS-Base.repo under {base] and [updates]:

exclude=kernel*

I also add this under [centosplus]:

includepkgs=kernel*

For usb webcams there’s still another step: Getting the gspca drivers installed.

The dkms-gspca package from Dag worked in previous versions, but under CentOS 5.3 didn’t for me. As a result I had to get the gspca tarball from the project download page and compile it myself.

Compiling was actually easier than I thought it would be. All you have to do is unarchive the package, cd into the source directory and run the command

./gspca_build

Verifying it was built, installed and loaded only took an /sbin/lsmod at the console. Selected output:

videodev 25793 1 gspca v4l1_compat 16069 1 videodev v4l2_common 24385 1 videodev

Since the utilities available on the gspca website wouldn’t compile for me, I installed xawtv from Dag’s repository an was able to verify the webcam was now working.