A New Virtual Laptop, part 3

geaplanet asked whether my HP dv2000 (dv2058ea) laptop has a built-in webcam. Indeed it does. It's built into the lid, and says that it is also a 1.3MP camera.

Does it work? No, not out of the box with SUSE Linux 10.1. The quickest way for me to test it was to fire up "GnomeMeeting", and the camera didn't appear as an available video device (I had no available video devices). Presumably I need to track down a suitable driver, or someone who can produce one. What I've found in the past is that there are only a few basic hardware types for the different webcams that are available, so often an existing driver can be modified to support a new webcam. Sometimes it can be as simple as having the USB ID added to the list that the driver supports. The webcam in the dv2000 shows up as a Sonix USB 2.0 camera; the device identifier is 221888 and the vendor identifier is 199749 (if that helps anyone).

That said, video is low of my list of priorities. The lid of the laptop also contains a pair microphones (wow, stereo), but as noted previously, I don't have sound working yet.

There are a couple of other things I've found, too. If I hibernate the laptop and resume it, the touchpad doesn't work after resuming. The dv2000 has a lot of little blue lights on it, and one is for the touchpad. It glows blue when enabled, orange when disabled. After resuming, the light stays orange, and I haven't been able to re-enable it except by rebooting. Also, sometimes after the host OS's screensaver has kicked in, the screen colours go wild. It looks like the colours are inverted and reduced to 16 or 256 colours, something like that. The only way I've been able to fix it is to restart X-Windows.

Having to restart X-Windows is one situtation where running VMware pays off. Normally, if you have to restart X-Windows, it kills all of your GUI applications. Since I'm running VMware Server, my only host GUI application is usually the VMware Server Console. That can be stopped and restarted anytime without affecting your VMware sessions, so if I have to restart X-Windows, I don't lose the GUI applications in my VMware sessions.

In spite of all this, the dv2000 is running pretty well, and I'm mostly happy. I do need to get audio working, though, for VOIP. Without that, it will be a problem when I'm travelling.