This HOWTO assumes that you're going to perform a fresh installation of Slackware 12. So lets start :
In this howto, i install Slackware on 3 sofware RAID0 configurations using mdadm. One for /, one for /home and another one for /mnt/extras.
Boot up the Slackware DVD and log in as root. Use cfdisk to create the partitions on the harddrives :
The partitioning scheme for my 2 x 80GB SATA harddrives :
/dev/sda : sda1 Primary Linux ext3 139.83 sda2 Primary Linux raid autodetect 5116.13 sda3 Primary Linux raid autodetect 59411.20 sda4 Primary Linux raid autodetect 15356.60
/dev/sdb : sdb1 Primary Linux raid autodetect 5116.13 sdb2 Primary Linux raid autodetect 59411.20 sdb3 Primary Linux raid autodetect 15356.60
sda1 is a 140MB partition dedicated to hold the kernel image as well as the bootloader since no bootloader i know of can boot off a software RAID 0 array. Build your arrays with Multiple Devices Admin (mdadm) program ( level=0 : Striped/RAID0, level=1 : Mirrorred/RAID1, level=4/5/6/10, man mdadm for more help on this )
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb1 # for root
mdadm --create /dev/md1 --level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb2 # for home
Now fire up the installation as usual (# setup) Now, when it comes to selecting partitions, pick /dev/md0 as the target for "/" (root) As you progress in the installer, create the mountpoints :
"/home" for the device "/dev/md1"
"/boot" for the bootloader on "/dev/sda1"
"/mnt/extras" or anything else for "/dev/md2" [this step is optional]
Install everything as you normally would. Now we mount Slackware (/dev/md0) and the boot partition and chroot into the system
mkdir /mnt/md0
mount /dev/md0 /mnt/md0
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/md0/boot
chroot /dev/md0
Now we are in the OS installed on our software RAID array. Next we mount the Slackware DVD, install and setup GRUB (because i prefer GRUB to LILO ;)
Create boot entries in menu.lst for GRUB to boot (# nano /boot/boot/grub/menu.lst) My /boot/boot/grub/menu.lst looks like this :
timeout 10 title Slackware Linux 12.0 root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/md0 ro boot
Save & Close. Just to make sure that fstab mounts the right arrays in the right places, its better to take a look at it is in /etc before we boot into the system (# nano /etc/fstab) My /etc/fstab looks something like this (Your's probably should look something similar to this ) :
Summer, 2008 Blissfully unaware about Hardware Compatibility Lists in driver pages, i finally got myself a USB web cam. It was this little thing i thought would work without hassle. >>
Looks like i was wrong. A `lsusb` output on my Debian GNU/Linux box and this was what i got :
$lsusb 093a:2460 Pixart Imaging, CIF Single Chip
Looking all good, i headed down to Google to search for the vendor ID. I ended up with this (http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html) page and found out that my cam was supported by the spca5xx drivers. Downloaded the tarball from the same site, wasted a couple of hours downloading hell lot of dependencies for the compilation and finally it compiled. ;)
It just didn't work no matter what. The cam was sitting there literally for months together until i found another blog deeply hidden in Google in which the guy had the same problem as mine and thank heavens he had a workaround too.
So this is what i had to do :
$ cd /path/to/the/tarball/ $ tar xvf gspcav1-20071224.tar.gz $ cd gspca/modules/gspca/Pixart/
Once there, you need to edit a file called pac207.h In Line 137, replaceif(id[0]!=0x27)with if(id[0]!=0x27 || id[1]!=0x08) So you'll end up with this :
.... PDEBUG(2, " Pixart Sensor ID 0x%02X Chips ID 0x%02X !!\n", id[0], id[1]); if(id[0]!=0x27 || id[1]!=0x08) return -ENODEV;
return 0; ....
Well, that's pretty much it. Just save the file, close and rebuild it with "make" and "make install" as root. Plug in the cam and you'll see some messages appear in `dmesg | tail` if your webcam was successfully detected and gspca driver was loaded right and yes the cam was working!
P.S : If your kernel doesn't auto-load modules, just do a modprobe gspca
