theboywho.me.uk

There is a kernel module for this webcam called r5u870, however a new project is producing a purely user space implementation. The website for both is: http://www.arakhne.org/ricoh/

The instructions to install the newer driver from the r5u87x () driver package’s README file:

$ sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev libusb-dev build-essential gcc automake mercurial
$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/ahixon/r5u87x/
$ cd r5u87x
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo r5u87x-loader --reload


If your camera appears to be playing up, you can try forcefully resetting it:
$ sudo r5u87x-loader --force-clear

Now, the loader will automatically be run on boot when it detects your webcam. Alas, there are some bugs, and my device has some kind of ghosting issue which shows two of me!

Some packages in Gentoo require kernel sources to be installed. In my case it was the DRBD kernel module.

The system I wanted to install it on is actually a Linode. They provide the sources for the VPS kernels but I needed a way to pursuade Portage that it didn’t need to install gentoo-sources before drbd-kernel. I didn’t want to use –nodeps.

I found the solution in chapter 5 of part 3 of the Gentoo Handbook:

1. Create a file called package.provided in /etc/portage/profile. You may need to create that directory:
2. Add a line corresponding to the package you want to inject:

   sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.25-r1

Note: The package name you provide must exist in portage. You can’t inject virtual packages and you have to provide a full package name with version number. The following don’t work:

virtual/kernel-sources
sys-kernel/gentoo-sources
=sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-*