[CentOS] 5.5 & gspca

Mon Jun 14 19:59:34 UTC 2010
Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk>

On 14/06/10 20:24, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>
> I have absolutely no intention of taking the latest snapshot. Did you just
> skim over the last sentence I wrote, above? I don't need anything LATEST
> AND GREATEST, I just want something ->STABLE<- that will run the bloody
> old Labtech (Labtek?) cameras, and *not* spit out pointless error
> messages.
>

It may be latest and greatest, but it is also hopefully the most stable 
version as a lot of the development work done involves fixing bugs, and 
that's generally how software becomes more stable. If you're getting 
errors, try reporting them upstream - in my experience they are very 
swiftly fixed.

All this started because JohnS and yourself were talking about the old 
gspca driver that is deprecated, and over 4 years old now. All I'm 
trying to say is if you need a driver for gspca, don't use that (old 
unsupported) one, use this (newer supported) one.

> By the way, what is "rolling development"? Does this mean that there are
> *no* releases, or version numbers? If so, how can I tell what was the last
> stable version, and what is where they started adding features for the
> next release?

There is no last stable version, releases or version numbers in much the 
same way that the kernel has no version numbers for the vast majority of 
individual drivers it contains. People fix bugs and add features as 
necessary on a continual basis. Rhetorical: What would you propose - 
every Monday at noon everything stops for an hour while they take a 
snapshot and call it "STABLE". That is what I mean by rolling development.

But as you run Enterprise Linux, and are rightly concerned with 
stability, rather than update your whole kernel to the latest and 
greatest, ELRepo gives you the opportunity to retain your stable 
Enterprise Linux kernel and run *only* the updated hardware drivers that 
you need to support hardware that isn't directly supported by your 
stable Enterprise Linux kernel.

<snip>

>
> So I just need that, and *not* the apps? I mean, gspca is a video driver
> that motion can use.
>

Yes, gspca is the driver for the webcam. The apps live in a separate 
branch here:

http://linuxtv.org/hg/dvb-apps/

which you can build/package separately if you need them. ELRepo don't 
build/offer them as they are not kernel drivers.