Today, as I was moving all the furniture to another room in preparation for the coming of the baby, I had to put together my wife's deskptop. The last thing was the installation of her new Logitech WebCam. To say "install" is an exaggeration because all I had to do was plug it in one of the usb ports of the desktop computer and open the program named Cheese! (Yes, as many other women, my wife also uses Linux and understands it pretty well, although Mark Shuttleworth might not believe it). That was all: plug and play. Nothing complicated to do.Then I rebooted her computer in Windows and placed the CD with the driver on the tray to install it there. I cannot say that it was necessarily difficult, but I had to reboot three times following the instructions to get the device running.
The interesting part of the story took place when she told me that she wanted to give the old cam to her sister. So, I packed it inside the box of the new one and remembered that I needed the CD with the driver for the cam I just removed. When I asked my wife for the CD, she simply said "It must be in the box where I keep all the things for the laptop. If not, I don't know where it is".
As she is 37 weeks pregnant and cannot move much, I found the box and checked it, but the camera driver was missing. For a split second, a flash of an ancient fear traveled through my body. My wife saw my face and calmly said to me: "Maybe I lost it..." I immediately understood my wife's peace. SHE NEVER USES WINDOWS ANYWAY. If ALL the drivers are lost, what is the problem? No worry whatsoever. A Mandriva install gave her everything she needs to use her computer.
Too bad for her sister, though. She uses Windows and must either download the lost driver or wait until my wife finds the disc.
Drivers are a nightmare. People say it's the weakest point of Linux systems, but I think it is indeed amazing that Linux tries to run whatever device you plug into your system.
ResponderEliminarOr a third option. Install GNU/Linux.
ResponderEliminarTrue. My wife gave her sister the third option. I'm pretty sure that her sister will install a GNU/Linux next time her computer breaks thanks to viruses.
ResponderEliminarYou might want to try using guvcview with that camera in Linux instead of cheese. If cheese works ok for you, then forget I said anything, but in my case (different webcam), I found that cheese gave near slideshow frame rates when I tried to record video, but guvcview worked great (and offered more video options than the included Windows software did)
ResponderEliminar@ anónimo
ResponderEliminarHey, thank you! I had never heard of guvcview. I'll give it a try ;-)
what is the name of this webcam
ResponderEliminar(lost CD and hard to install)