Monday, April 14, 2008

HP Pavilion Webcam on Fedora 9

Folks at mediati are working hard to bring the r5u870 webcam work with the latest linux kernels, after the initial work done by Sam Revitch on this type of webcam.

I've again built the rpm package to work with the Latest Fedora 9 (rawhide as of 14-apr-08). Older RPM with the source code from Sam Revitch can be downloaded here http://lsb.blogdns.com/ry5u870

Download this Package for Fedora dkms-r5u870-0.11.0-8.noarch.rpm.bz2 , this package compiles on all fedora distributions with linux kernel higher than 2.6.16 (even the latest 2.6.25-rc9, Fedora 9)

Installation process


1. Download and extract this file


 bunzip2 dkms-r5u870-0.11.0-8.noarch.rpm.bz2

2. Install this package with yum.


yum install ./dkms-r5u870-0.11.0-8.noarch.rpm --nogpg


3. Start your favorite viewer to see the webcam (ex. tvtime)


tvtime

NOTE: Currently cheese is not able to read from the webcam for some reason (tested in Fedora 9 rawhide). But the webcam works in gstreamer-properties

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Fedora 9 and Latest Nvidia 173.08 Driver

Nvidia has released its latest version of the xorg 1.5 compatible drivers. You no longer need to follow my techique for 173.08 version driver . See my new blog entry for details

Nvidia has released its latest drivers for Linux which has support for the latest x.org versions (1.5) which are used in the Fedora 9 release (currently beta was released). Follow these steps in order to use the latest Nvidia driver in your Fedora 9

NOTE: I really tested and using these things in my laptop currently, things should work for others too. THIS METHOD IS COMPLETELY UNSUPPORTED BY FEDORA FOLKS, BUT WORKS.

[NOTE] This process works on Latest Fedora 9 Too. But you'll not be able to make use of any of the glx capabilities , so all the commands like glxgears, nvidia-settings will give errors

step-1 : Install the Latest nvidia driver (download rpm from freshrpms or livna)

yum install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia


step-2 : Nvidia suggests that we use the -ignoreABI option to use these drivers with the latest xorg servers. Follow these steps to setup such way.

1. Logout of X ( preferably go to runlevel 3 or 1, anything other than 5)

init 3


2. Rename the /usr/bin/Xorg binary to any other name like /usr/bin/Xorg.o

mv /usr/bin/Xorg /usr/bin/Xorg.0


3. Create a shell script named /usr/bin/Xorg

touch /usr/bin/Xorg
chmod +x /usr/bin/Xorg


4. Now edit the /usr/bin/Xorg and put these two lines

vi /usr/bin/Xorg

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/Xorg.0 -ignoreABI "$@"


5. close the file

6. Confirm that your /etc/X11/xorg.conf has the driver set as 'nvidia'

my xorg.conf follows


[nareshv@fallenAngel ~]$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
Option "IgnoreABI" "true"
Option "omit xfree86-dga" # don't initialise the DGA extension
EndSection

Section "Files"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/nvidia"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "glx"
Load "extmod"
Load "dbe"
Load "dri2"
Load "dri"
Load "xtrap"
Load "GLcore"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
DefaultDepth 24
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "UseDamageEvents" "True"
Option "OnDemandVBlankInterrupts" "True"
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection


7. Reboot into runlevel 5.

init 5.


8. Now you should see the system using nvidia driver as the default one.


Few Gotchas:

1. Currently only 2D works, NVIDIA is working on getting 3D as soon as x.org 1.5 version is released.

2. None of the 3d commands work glxinfo,glxgears, all because of lack of 3d support.

3. Now i am able to play the movies in mplayer when i've replaced the nvidia's libwfb.so with libwfb.so the xorg itself has.

-- last updated (Fri April 18 2008)