I bought the Logitech Ultra Vision webcam a month or so ago. The Windows XP/Vista installation was painless and took 2 minutes. But who’s using Windows these days?

Getting an image from it in Linux was quite a pain. It didn’t work out of the box. No plug’n play. Nothing. Just a black screen worth 70 € of hardware. Grrr….

But here’s the recipe how I got it to work in Ubuntu Linux 7.10. This doesn’t mean that it will work for you, too.
First I installed the uvc webcam driver. Learn more about it on http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/.

sudo apt-get install subversion
svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk tmp-uvc
cd tmp-uvc
make
sudo make install

Now you should have the driver installed. Better than nothing.
To get the viewer that can also take pictures and avis, try

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-devwget http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca50x/Investigation/uvc/luvcview-20070512.tar.gz
tar zxvf luvcview-20070512.tar.gz
cd luvcview-20070512
make
sudo make install

You should visit http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html for more information about luvcview. If you have done everything right so far, you can start luvcview with this command:

luvcview -s 640x480

I got the best image result by simply pushing the “Reset all to default” button in the middle of the screen.
And now, have some fun…