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Macbook's Built-in iSight camera on Fedora

Mar 23, '08 2:30 AM
for everyone

I spent much of the extended weekend (Friday was Doljatra & Good Friday) trying to get the camera on my Intel Macbook to work on Fedora. You can find almost all the non-Fedora specific information is available at http://bersace03.free.fr/ift/.

So I went ahead and created a RPM (review request: #438561), spent some time fiddling with udev because I was not getting a /dev/video0 to represent the camera, and then discovered that the USB device ID (obtained from lsusb) had to be explicitly specified to ift-load to get the firmware to actually load on to the device.

As mentioned on http://bersace03.free.fr/ift/ Ekiga was a breeze to set up, but Cheese was not. Cheese 0.2.4 which ships with Fedora 8 kept crashing with a SIGSEGV somewhere deep inside the GStreamer library. It was a classical case of strcpy(des, NULL). So one has to grab Cheese 2.22.x from Rawhide and update GStreamer accordingly. If you happen to have the gstreamer-plugins-bad packages from Livna then you might be in for a 350MB download. You have been warned. :-)

Tags: fedora, gnome, gnu, linux

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cnolan wrote on Mar 23, '08

I have found that the standard F8 cheese package works ok, but indeed you need to update gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins-base, and gstreamer-plugins-good to the latest versions to make it work. I have built these from source into RPMs that I will be hosting for those that don't fancy building them themselves (until the fedora packaging guys get round to doing it).

You can find more info on the Macbook and iSight camera in my guide here: http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/Fedora8OnMacBookSantaRosa#iSight_camera

debarshiray wrote on Mar 24, '08

I have fixed the Fedora package's udev rules file and applied for CVS. The package will soon be available to Fedora users. By the way are you interested in co-maintainership?

cnolan wrote on Mar 24, '08

Hi Debarshi, thats great work in getting together a Fedora RPM for isight-firmware-tools.

I'd be very interested in co-maintainership, that would be great - thanks! I had been looking for a little project to get me started in the world of package maintaining for Fedora. I'll hook up with you in private to discuss it further.

debarshiray wrote on Mar 26, '08

Upstream has released a newer version of these tools, and it looks like they have added support for some of the latest Mac OS drivers. Maybe you should update the guide on the Wiki.