I have been trying to get a CCTV system running using only components that I have at the house, and not buying any software. These are
- Second hand 1MHz Pentium 3 with intel motherboard
- 20Gig hard drive
- 100MB SDRAM
- USB Webcam (MSI StarCam 370i)
- SuSE Linux/Windows98
So where to start? I didn’t want to use my good computer because it uses way too much power for a simple thing like this. Also, I eventually wanted to position the unit around the house in different posisions, and that just wouldn’t be feasable. The other computer I had Windows98 installed allready so I started out trying software for that. The software the comes with the StarCam wouldn’t work on this system so that was a dead end. I found something written in Java called grabMotion, which seemed to work, almost. However, I just couldn’t get my camera recognised by the software.
After must installing and uninstalling on Windows I decided to try and use something I found that runs on Linux. The program is called ZoneMinder and has a very professinal feel to it. So I installed SuSE Linux 9.1 with Apache, Mysql, PHP and Perl already installed using the very lovely YAST that help you install stuff with SuSE. After some (well a few hours) of fiddling I eventually managed to get the software working, along with all of the JPEG and PNG libraries needed to create images. However, the down side is that I couldn’t get my web camera working with it. I’m sure that if I knew the first thing about installing USB Web cameras on Linux it would have worked. ZoneMinder tells me to point to a file, which presumably should be in /dev/usb, but no picture is ever found.
So does anyone know how I can install a USB camera into Linux? Any help would be great!