Is it possible to make a Microsoft LifeCam HD-5000 work under linux?

Question

I am trying to set up a virtual machine which will act as a home security system. (If you've chatted with me in The Tavern, you may know why...) I purchased two USB webcams (Microsoft LifeCam HD-5000) and am trying to get them to work with Motion. However when I connected them to my Ubuntu 10.10 VM, no /dev/video devices were created. dmesg said:

jnet@sharon:~$ dmesg|tail
[  558.421978] uvcvideo: Failed to initialize the device (-5).
[  558.423487] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
[  558.423492] USB Video Class driver (v0.1.0)
[  569.042808] usbcore: deregistering interface driver uvcvideo
[  570.840343] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device Microsoft® LifeCam HD-5000 (045e:076d)
[  585.801811] uvcvideo: UVC non compliance - GET_DEF(PROBE) not supported. Enabling workaround.
[  595.775370] uvcvideo: Failed to query (129) UVC probe control : -110 (exp. 26).
[  595.775592] uvcvideo: Failed to initialize the device (-5).
[  595.777012] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
[  595.777018] USB Video Class driver (v0.1.0)

There's a lot of results on Google for "uvcvideo: Failed to query (129) UVC probe control : -110 (exp. 26).". many people were saying to unload the uvcvideo module and reload it, because it loads before the usbaudio module. But no amount of unloading and reloading worked. A custom compile of the uvcvideo.ko module was suggested but the link to the source was dead.

Is there any way to make these webcams work under a *nix-like system? Please note it does not have to be Ubuntu, I was setting up a brand new VM for this purpose so I am open to any unix-like OS, be it Fedora, CentOS, a BSD flavor or even Open Solaris or similar.

Solution 1

Turns out the issue was VMware. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't make the camera work inside a virtual machine under VMware Server 2.0. Linux Mint was the only distro which even recognized it, and even then I kept getting errors that the camera could not be opened / IO errors.

Installing uvcvideo, cheese and motion directly on the host worked fine.

---

Three years later on a new host running VMware ESXi 5 I didn't have any of these problems, so it was a VMware Server 2 issue. (Now very, very outdated)

Solution 2

Here are two links, one is from Mint-linux saying it works in Mint. There are two videos on Youtube showing it being used with Mint and Ubuntu.

Comments

[Hugo]

Awesome, I'll try Mint this weekend and see if that works!

[Adam F]

Have you tried running virtualbox as root, then dropping the camera in the virtual machine?

[Hugo]

No @Adam, and I have since migrated to VMware ESXi which resolved the problem. I'll update my answer.