Motion MyDSL

Forum: Multimedia
Topic: Motion MyDSL
started by: JohnH

Posted by JohnH on Mar. 12 2006,02:49

I just tried to install motion. The install went without any warnings or errors but Motion seems to be nowhere.

BTW I have a Creative webcam PD1001 and the led on is on with it plugged in.

How do I find Motion or any other web cam operating tool?

Posted by mikshaw on Mar. 12 2006,07:22

I can't tell you what's wrong, since I've never used it, but I can make a guess. Any myDSL with a tar.gz or uci filename extension is installed into /opt, and therefore not in your PATH. If it's a case where using "which motion", or trying to run the app with a command without a full path does not work, then that's probably your answer. Beyond that, I'm afraid I don't know.

Posted by newOldUser on Mar. 12 2006,14:34

JohnH,

Before you fiddle with motion.dsl I would suggest you download gqcam092.dsl. gqcam is a good way to test to see if your webcam will work. If the cam doesn't work with gqcam then it's not going to work with motion. So download gqcam092.dsl from the multimedia sections. After it's downloaded then look in your menu (no icon is installed on the desktop). You should see that it's added to your menu. Click on gqcam, it should start up and if you're lucky you will see video from your camera. If you don't see any video then somethings wrong, your camera may not work with DSL or maybe the USB system hasn't picked it up (since you said the LED is on I think the system has detected it).

If you get a picture and the colors look reversed then try clicking on File...Preferences...Filters and activating the RGB filter.

Click the QUIT button to end gqcam.

If the camera doesn't work with gqcam nothing you do in motion will work since linux can't read your camera. I'm using an old, cheap D-Link DSB-C100 camera. I have no idea what chipset it is. I just got lucky and it worked. Several others I've tried have not.

When you downloaded motion.dsl it put a motion.conf file in your home directory. This config file controls what motion will do. You need to read and understand what it's telling the program. I think I set it up to be pretty generic. No icon will be added to your desktop. Motion is not a GUI application like gqcam is, it runs in the background.

After I setup my motion.conf here's how I run motion. I open a terminal which puts me at the ready prompt in my home directory (the directory that contains the motion.conf). Then I enter the command /opt/motion/motion This executes the motion program stored in the directory /opt/motion.

To stop motion enter CRTL-C

The default is to store the pictures in /home/dsl/motion/pics

There are many options in the motion.conf file that can change how and when a picture is taken they all should be explained on the motion website at < http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome >

Good luck

Posted by JohnH on Mar. 13 2006,03:00

Ok thanks for thge reply. It looks like the Creative CS 10012464120474 is one of the cams that doesnt work with linux.

Is there a list of ones that do?

Posted by newOldUser on Mar. 13 2006,12:11

I do not know of any list. I can tell you that a 4 year old Logitech "eyeball" webcam does not work. I've also tried a 4 year old Intel webcam and it didn't work.

Since DSL is related to Knoppix, you may be able to find a list at www.knoppix.com. I'm sure the problem is not the camera since I've seen all these camera work under windows, but rather the driver software. If your camera works under Knoppix it may be possible to copy the driver over or once the driver is identified to recompile it under DSL.

We can also ask other members with webcams to try using gqcam and reporting back on if it worked.

Posted by doobit on Mar. 15 2006,19:35

I remember seeing a list somewhere. Here is one that I found, but there may be some better ones:

< http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html >

Posted by ber on Mar. 18 2006,12:00

doobit,

in that list you can see the webcams suported by the spca5xx driver, but this driver is not in the last DSL version.
I'm trying to set up an old Pentium MMX 166Mhz. 422HD, 38MB RAM with DSL instaled in HD. as a webcam server to control some instalations. I tryed a creative notebook PD1171 webcam and a pixart imaging webcam and none of them works.
they need the spca5xx driver but I have been not able to compile this driver(I think theres something to do with the compiler in DSL).
any help about brands of webcams that works with DSL or how to install the driver will be very appreciate.

Posted by observer on Nov. 27 2007,19:49

I just got a super-cheap (~4$!) Sonix VGA Ov7630 type USB webcam up and running on an a freebie 300 MHz laptop. My version of DSL (3.4 i think) uses the 2.4.26 kernel, so I used spca5xx.o as mentioned here < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....25;st=0 >

The motion.dsl from MyDSL installed ok, but didn't run. It looked like it was configured for someone else's exact CPU type. So I recompiled motion after configing using --without-optimizecpu :

./configure --without-optimizecpu

Which allowed me to run the resulting motion executable on other PCs with DSL.

(I ran into a similar issue for Mplayer using the mplayer.dsl from MyDSL: it too had been compiled for a specific CPU. I recompiled it after configuring it like:

./configure --enable-runtime-cpudetection --disable-ssse3

Which made it happy on other CPUs than the specific one for which it was compiled.)

Many thanks to all the fine folks that made DSL happen!