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    Fri, 04 Mar 2005

    Philips webcam

    Linux support for Philips USB webcams halted
    Okay, this is not going to be pleasant. I've decided to discontinue supporting PWC, the Philips webcam driver for Linux. The reason is continual disagreement between me and the kernel maintainers on the binary-only part that PWC has, in order to use the webcam to its full potential. This has now reached a point where I'm throwing in the towel.

    Restoring the Philips Webcam Driver
    Users of the Philips webcam driver known as 'pwc' will be relieved to the learn that the driver will continue to be part of the Linux kernel. In an earlier dispute over the removal of a special hook only used to load its binary-only counterpart the author requested that the entire driver be removed, a request agreed to by Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

    Alan Cox agreed to be the maintainer for pwc.

    http://ngc891.blogdns.net/kernel/docs/howto-patch.txt
    Example of patching process to get pwc/pwcx in the kernel

    http://ngc891.blogdns.net/index.php?q=pwcx

    http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-usb-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg31183.html
    In the meantime Luc Saillard (http://saillard.org/linux/pwc/) hast taken over the maintenance of the (GPL'ed) sources ...

    http://saillard.org/linux/pwc/
    Free Philips USB Webcam driver for Linux that supports VGA resolution, newer kernels and replacing the old pwcx module.

    http://saillard.org/linux/pwc/INSTALL.en
    says "3) ... (this needs the source of your actual kernel to be installed)

    http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc3/x86/
    says "An exploded source tree is not required to build kernel modules against the currently in-use kernel." And pwc-10.0.6a seems to build OK without it.

    PWC Documentation Project
    This is a web-based collaboration area for the next generation Philips Web Camera Linux Kernel Module.

    Built 10.0.6-unoficial and it works. Quite a lot bigger than version 9.0.2-unoficial. 
    -rwxr--r--  1 root root  86424 Feb  2 16:43 pwc.ko.9
-rwxr--r--  1 root root 421828 Mar  4 15:11 pwc.ko.10
    "strip"ing pwc.ko.* brings the sizes down to 74092 and 73952 respectively.

    [ /hardware | # ]