HOWTO: Fix iSight in Hardy

[benanzo]

Unfortunately despite all the great improvements we've seen in Hardy, the iSights on our Apple Intel Macs got left a little out in the cold. First we're having problems getting the firmware to load, then after fixing that the stock uvcvideo.ko doesn't create a valid video chain which causes the camera not to work at all.

Below are the instructions to get your iSight up and running.

First, if you haven't already done it go ahead and add the Mactel PPA to your /etc/apt/sources.list. This is a good repo to find Mactel-specific fixes and features, including where we'll find the tools to fix our iSights.

# Mactel PPA
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mactel-support/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/mactel-support/ubuntu hardy main

Next open a terminal and do:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install isight-firmware-tools

Go ahead and put the iSight firmware (AppleUSBVideoSupport) in /lib/firmware

Now we're going to use one of the utilities we just installed to extract the iSight firmware so it can be properly loaded:

$ sudo ift-extract -a /lib/firmware/AppleUSBVideoSupport

We're now done messing with the iSight firmware portion of the fix. Now test to see if your iSight works by doing:

$ sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo
$ sudo modprobe uvcvideo

If your camera works (test with Cheese or Ekiga) then you're done. Otherwise you might try compiling a new uvcvideo as detailed below:

$ sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo
$ sudo mv /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/ubuntu/media/usbvideo/uvcvideo.ko /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/ubuntu/media/usbvideo/uvcvideo.ko.orig
$ sudo apt-get install libusb-0.1-4 libusb-dev linux-headers-$(uname -r) subversion
$ svn co --revision 205 svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk uvcvideo-r205
$ cd uvcvideo-r205
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo depmod -ae
$ sudo modprobe uvcvideo

If it worked then Cheese should autostart after that last command. If it doesn't then try starting Cheese by hand. If the camera still doesn't work go ahead and try rebooting. It is also possible that halting your machine (power off completely) then starting it up again instead of a simple reboot will fix the problem.

Good Luck!