Sony VAIO Camera Driver for Ubuntu

After installing Ubuntu and configuring it to look like windows, one thing that was really lacking was the web cam driver, I could not do video call from Gmail. This time with little easy, I found a link which help to install the driver easily.

First check which is your camera, by typing in the command lsusb, which shows something below.

Bus 006 Device 002: ID 045e:00a4 Microsoft Corp. 
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 044e:3012 Alps Electric Co., Ltd 
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 044e:3013 Alps Electric Co., Ltd 
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 044e:3010 Alps Electric Co., Ltd Bluetooth Adapter
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 044e:3011 Alps Electric Co., Ltd 
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 05ca:1839 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC6 [R5U870]

The camera is from Ricoh Co. Ltd, VGP-VCC6[R5U870] 

The packages provided (both source and binary) include only the loader software and do not contain the microcode, whose copyright and license status is unclear. Instead, a simple shell script is provided that can download and install the microcode directly from the upstream repository.

Installation

========

1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:r5u87x-loader/ppa

2. sudo apt-get update

3. sudo apt-get install r5u87x

4. sudo /usr/share/r5u87x/r5u87x-download-firmware.sh

(Step 1 only works on Ubuntu 9.10 and newer. On 8.04 you will need to add this PPA to your APT sources manually.)

Supported hardware

================

05ca:1803 Flybook V5

05ca:1810 HP Pavilion Webcam

05ca:1835 Sony Camera VGP-VCC5 (used on Sony Vaio SZ laptops)

05ca:1836 Sony Camera VGP-VCC4 (used on Sony Vaio FE laptops)

05ca:1837 Sony Camera VGP-VCC4 (used on Sony Vaio FZ laptops)

05ca:1839 Sony Camera VGP-VCC6 (used on Sony Vaio CR laptops)

05ca:183a Sony Camera VGP-VCC7 (used on Sony Vaio SZ and TZ11 laptops)

05ca:183b Sony Camera VGP-VCC8 (used on Sony Vaio FZ laptops)

05ca:183e Sony Camera VGP-VCC9 (used on Sony Vaio FZ laptops)

Hope this helps !

Compile Device Driver for Linux in Eclipse

There is an easy way to compile device driver in Linux using eclipse, once its been setup life becomes much easy, as you don't have to switch between the editor and the command shell every time you need to change something,

Here is the screen shot of my project, Look at it carefully, all you need to add to the project are main.c and a makefile. rest are the result of compilation. makefile will only contain one line obj-m := main.o

Most of the things remain same for the simple C project as mentioned in the previous post, after creating the project, you need to change the command to build the project as,

make -C /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.35-22-generic M=$(PWD) modules

The path given above is my linux kernel header file path, change to yours accordingly. After this, you set the build directory to the directory of your source code for device drivers. And in the behavior tab, remove the all from build command line, other wise it will crib saying could not find rule to build all !! 

Thats it, you are ready to use the Eclipse IDE for device driver development, all the best !