Webcam How-To

This page is a draft only
It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page.

Author: Valent Turkovic

If you have a webcam that needs a driver module that it is not in the Fedora kernel, then you usually need to compile it manually. Fedora doesn't include any modules that aren't in the upstream kernel. Third-party repositories may have modules for additional webcams. But if you have a webcam, like mine, that requires the uvcvideo module, then the only solution is to compile it manually.

The first step in getting your webcam working is to check to see if it is working, but you don't know that it is.

Install an application called cheese with your favorite gui or cli tool. I use yum, so here is how I installed it:

su -
yum install cheese

If your webcam works, you're finished.

To launch the cheese application

On the GNOME panel click Applications>Accessories>Cheese

You can also launch it by typing

cheese

If it doesn't work, then you need to find out which webcam module you need to install or compile.

To determine this, use the v4l2-tool application. If you don't have it, use your favorite method to install it. Once started, you will see the following screen:

Click on the last tab labeled "Suggest Driver":

Next, click on the "lsusb output" button:

At this point, you need to identify which of all the listed usb devices is the one for your particular webcam. My output consisted of just two lines, and I recognized microdia as the manufacturer of my webcam. I used the manufacturer and model ID from that line - in my case that was 0c45:62c0.

Finally, you need to enter that information back into the main window in the "Vendor ID" and "Product ID" boxes, and click on the "Suggest Dirver" button:

Note: "Dirver" is clearly a misspelling of the word "Driver".

This should allow you to download the appropriate driver module for your webcam.