Sony Motion Eye Camera

[will]

Hi everyone... I have a Sony Vaio VGN-FJ170. It has a built-in Motion Eye web cam. I have never been able to get this to work with linux... any ideas? It shows up in the device manager and is recognized and everything but if I go to "Computer" in Nautilus it doesn't show up there.

Anyone know anything about this?

Thanks in advance!

-Will

[scorp123]

I have one of those old Sony Vaio C1 sub-notebooks and it has that camera too ("Kawasaki Steel Corp. Motion Eye"). You need to make sure that the "sonypi" (Sony's Programmable Interrupt Controller) driver is loaded upon system start, or else the camera will never work. I suggest to Google this, e.g. "Linux vaio sonypi meye" ... You should find plenty of hints about this.

[will]

Yes I've done that... seen a lot about that driver but I don't know how to check if the sonypi driver is actually getting loaded....

Thanks for the help!

-Will

[scorp123]

but I don't know how to check if the sonypi driver is actually getting loaded....

Code: Select all

sudo lsmod

OR:

Code: Select all

sudo lsmod | grep sony

[will]

the sonypi driver is loading... this is odd...

[scorp123]

the sonypi driver is loading... this is odd...

No, it's not. Did you configure it correctly? Per default it will assume that there is no camera! So you have to modify a few files (e.g. /etc/modules.conf) and tell it that there is a camera it needs to take care of too. There are plenty of tutorials out on the WWW about this, see my post about Googling all this above.

[will]

Oh okay. Thanks.. I'll look into this.

- Will

[scorp123]

Oh okay. Thanks.. I'll look into this.

the problem is that there are too many Sony laptops that use the same Interrupt controller and don't have the camera. So the driver --being reverse-engineered without Sony's official blessings-- can't really know if the camera part is needed or not. So a little tweaking may be needed.

[will]

The tweaking instructions that I've found say I need to modify /etc/modules.conf but I only have /etc/modules.... /etc/modules.conf doesn't exist. Should I just create it?

Maybe I'll look for different instructions.