Logitech Quick Cam Pro 5000 on Windows 7

Well, I had a little bit of a bout with the Logitech Quick Cam Pro 5000 on Windows 7 where Windows 7 didn't seem to have any drivers to load.  What I did was download this from the Logitech FTP site.  I used Wine on Linux to run to exe and find its working directory and copy the Drivers folder.  Then on Windows 7 (64-bit), I plugged the webcam and let it search for drivers.  Open the Device Manager and right click on the unknown device to update the driver software.  I navigated to the x64 folder and used Pro464 folder and let it install that driver.  Voila, Logitech Quick Cam Pro 5000 running just fine on Windows 7.

Checking nVIDIA driver blob versions

I'm half thinking about a GPU upgrade for my desktop machine and I'm also thinking that hotswapping an nVIDIA card for my aging GeForce 9500 GT may work.  Doing a bit of homework, I decided to check what the driver version is right now.

$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version

NVRM version: NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module  313.30  Wed Mar 27 16:56:45 PDT 2013

GCC version:  gcc version 4.7.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.7.3-1ubuntu1) 

From the NV's documentation, it covers GPUs all the way to GTX 770.  That's good to know!

Revisiting fglrx and multi-monitor setup on Ubuntu 13.04

I really hate that multi-monitor is broken for muxless AMD/Intel hybrid laptops on 13.04.  I've gotten all the way to the latest 13.11 beta and the problems remain.  However, I did uncover some interesting things.

The desktop display options have always been conspicuously absent on amdcccle.  It seems to have been caused by the RandR 1.2 extensions being enabled.  According to this link and this link, it seems I have to disable RandR from xorg and amd's own config file.  One day, I will get to try it on my own.

1. Edit /etc/ati/amdpcsdb and add EnableRandR12=Sfalse on the [AMDPCSROOT/SYSTEM/DDX] section.
2. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add Option "EnableRandR12" "false" on "Device" section.

Public Service Announcement: Do not upgrade FGLRX to 13.9 STABLE

I've been on the fence on upgrading to 13.9 after reading that it's possibly based on an older driver.  Right now, there seems to be a clear sign that that is indeed the case.  Hang on till October, 2013 for the new driver release.  I hope they actually FIX the dual screen issues though managing code for 2 different graphics manufacturers (muxless hybrids) is quite a tall order.

FGLRX Post install do's...

This is a good precaution to do because updating your packages can inadvertently cause you to download bad versions of the fglrx drivers.

$ sudo apt-mark hold fglrx fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-dev

Progress on the fglrx dual monitor issue

Here's a nice little progress.  I think the root cause of my dual screen woes is the solution to get fglrx working in the first place!!!  This is some spectacular failure on AMD's part, but what else is new with AMD with Linux?

AMD did put out 13.8 beta drivers.  Hopefully, I can ditch the stupid solution and get my 2 screens back!

Worth looking into is the seemingly "Official" bug on launchpad.  Someone posted a possible workaround by disabling SNA acceleration.  Certainly worth a try.  I hate apt-marking outdated packages.

Section "Device"
      Identifier "intel"
      Driver "intel"
      Option "AccelMethod" "uxa"
EndSection

Random Thoughts

I discovered that Cheese crashes on my HP laptop.  The good news is that guvc works just fine.  I'm happy with it so bye bye, Cheese!

I just got the AMD Catalyst 13.4 stable.  Unlike the beta releases, the fglrx deb packages have the version numbers, so that's a good thing!

Ubuntu 13.04 upgrade prompts is showing up now.  I'll keep waiting till they get their issues sorted.

Finally some answers...

I've been, on occasion, scouring the net for answers on my AMD hardware on Ubuntu.  Support has been incredibly awful but I wasn't surprised.

lspci describes my hardware as: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Thames XT/GL [Radeon HD 7600M Series]

This provided me with an interesting article that seems to explain a possible solution to this problem.  Essentially, it looks like you need to install the latest beta driver from AMD to get things pseudo working.  Specifically, the post mentions that the 13.2 Beta 3 version works on the laptop.  Ubuntu distributes the 12.6 Catalyst which is virtually unusable here.

One has to wonder when Ubuntu plans to put the aforementioned driver in the repository.

Update:
An additional article that discusses this on Ubuntu.

Here is the launchpad link for Ubuntu's fglrx stuff.

Ubuntu 12.10 and FGLRX

Regarding the AMD crap driver on Ubuntu, this write up seems like a good one to keep handy on this blog.  I am going to wait for some dkms deb packages to arrive because there's no way I'm doing those custom driver installs now.  Still, the article is a good resource to have.

HP Pavilion G4-2123TX and the Realtek Card Reader Update

So, I saw a kernel update come in today from Ubuntu and I noticed that the rts5229 module wasn't being loaded.  I checked the driver being used and its: rtsx_pci.  I uninstalled the rts5229-dkms deb package and tried my SD card reader and Ubuntu loads it up without issues.  So I'm lead to believe that the new kernel update includes the drivers for these.  Good job, Canonical.

My current kernel is linux-image-3.5.0-24-generic.

It's fixed! libGL confusion!

After some searching, I began to understand the nature of the problem more. Basically, the build-dep pulled in a truck load of libraries for me to build Wine and one of them slipped this in:

/usr/lib/mesa/libGL.so.1.2

nvidia has their own libGL.so.1 that sits in /usr/lib but no matter what I did, ldconfig insists on using the latest version (and gets it wrong) by asserting the use of the mesa one. So, even though nvidia starts up just fine, the library it's using is wrong. That means that I don't get the hardware acceleration at all. Lesson learned.

For now, I created a .usr_lib_mesa folder and dumped libGL.so.1.2 in it so that if I ever need it, I can put it back. But immediately after removing it and having ldconfig rebuild, everything has been fine. The games run and glxinfo is now reporting what it needs to.

Goodness!

Credit to this post.