need kernel support for webcam(creative)

When you are booting up into Ubuntu do you get a boot-menu with lots of options for booting into Ubuntu? These usually have the number of the kernel, 2.6.??-??, it's the question marks bits that we're most interested in. Something like 2.6.28-11 or even much earlier should be plenty high enough to have support. Please let us know what kernel number you are currently on to help with that part of the problem.

I assume you have installed and tried "cheese" to no avail? There are various other packages but cheese is the one most people start off with. Try going up to the top-taskbar and click on

System - Administration - Synaptic Package Manager

it just wants your normal user password, not your SuperUser/Root one. Either search tool should help you find "cheese" and right click and then "Apply" should either install or re-install it. The search button searches in descriptions as well as titles so i prefer it so that i can be a bit more vague.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Tom the kernel I'm using is 2.6.28-13. I've read in other post that the person usually has to post a lsmeg or something close to that. I have done that in my terminal and my web cam was identified but when i tried the less/dsmeg it had no kernel support.

lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 03f0:7504 Hewlett-Packard Printing Support
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 041e:4036 Creative Technology, Ltd Webcam Live!/Live! Pro
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
here is lsusb recognising my web cam and id # 041e:4036

Ok, the kernel number seems plenty high enough. Often when you install a package using one of the package managers it asks to bring in other packages that it depends on in order to work properly. All these dependencies are given standard settings depending on what they detect as being plugged in at the time. Installing or re-installing "cheese" might be enough to drag in enough dependencies that the right ones are included for what you need.

I take it your camera is a "Creative Technology Webcam"? Is there an indication of model number? Err, is that "Creative" as in the people that are famous for manufacturing sound cards? If so then there may be some problem with getting this camera to work well in linux as that company seem determined to cut out the linux side of their market (by refusing to make an OpenSource driver) despite it being the fastest growing market in the IT industry today. If it is the same company and you're able to return the camera citing "lack of linux support" as the reason for returning it then that would help shift their stance. However, i think that's probably not the problem here.

There is a much better technical answer i'm sure but i don't know linux well enough from that angle yet. I was hoping for a few more people to join in with answering this question as launchpad doesn't deal with questions that are a day old or more so i would have to recommend either re-posting this question here but keep it brief
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+addquestion
perhaps add a link back to this question, here's the link
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/75534
also it might be worth posting this question on
http://www.linuxquestions.org
because it's better at dealing with questions that are open longer although it's more general linux rather than specific to Ubuntu. Also there are good forums at Ubuntu.com and other places please see this guide for other places worth trying
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToGetHelp

If you do get a good answer from elsewhere please post the link back in here to help us build up a better "Solved Answers Database" here. Sorry your question appears to have fallen through the net here, i've linked it to a bug-report about this issue but you'll see why i suggest trying other places if you read all the notice that's been taken of it.

Apols, good luck and regards from
Tom

Anyway Tom I took your advice and in synaptic package manager was the program "cheese" and it worked immediately. Thanks in that regard. I was hoping to build kernel support and modules for it but this saved me the time.

Great, that's good to hear :)) Nicely done :)

Now, (hopefully) some of those dependencies will be picked up by other programs adding to their functionality. Sorry it's an inelegant, klugey answer but Ubuntu is often quite bloated already and a tiny bit more doesn't make a huge difference.

Ideally i suppose it would be good to have a multi-boot machine and slowly build up a SlackWare (or TinyCore or Arch) specific to your needs and your machine
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/the-beginner-s-guide-to-slackware-linux-609245
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=slackware
DistroWatch is a popular place to compare different versions of linux. Notice that on their high-score board of top 100 distros Ubuntu is in 1st place :))

This way you would have Ubuntu as your fully functioning gnu/linux but could develop and learn a lot of linux skills via SlackWare. If you do want to go this route, and assuming you're fairly new to linux, then i would recommend trying out a few distros based on slackware first but ones that are fully functioning, portable, platform-independent (mostly) already
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=wolvix
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=vector
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=zenwalk
there are others, these are just ones i could remember easily. Wolvix is my favourite, especially their "Hunter" version. A cautionary tail from this poor young lady ;)
http://forums.wolvix.org/index.php/topic,1040.msg4956.html#msg4956

While you could have just one "/home" partition being used by many different installed distros (hence keeping all your data and settings in one place) i'm told that this works better if they each have a different "desktop environment". Ubuntu uses gnome, Kubuntu uses KDE, Wolvix uses the much lighter Xfce (as does Xubuntu) but can be easily switched to using one of the many other ones so that slackware could use Xfce without clashing with wolvix
http://forums.wolvix.org/index.php/topic,1292.0.html
http://forums.wolvix.org/index.php/topic,1275.0.html
http://forums.wolvix.org/index.php/topic,1329.0.html

I hope this helps in your quest :)
Welcome in to linux-land, happy hunting and regards from
Tom :)