Installation+FireWire+camera

A brief guide on how-to install Firewire (IEEE 1394) cameras under Ubuntu

1. Make sure that your kernel has IEEE1394 support. When this is not the case, you need to recompile your kernel with IEEE1394 support. You can check your kernel version using:

uname -r

Starting from Linux kernel 2.3.40 all these modules are automatically supported. A how-to on kernel compilation can be found here.

2. Insert the modules which are needed (root privileges may be required): modprobe ohci1394 modprobe video1394 modprobe ieee1394 modprobe raw1394

3. You can verify that all the modules are loaded correct using: lsmod

4. Attach the FireWire camera.

5. Check if the /dev/raw1394 and/or the /dev/video1394/ folder is created after you connected the FireWire camera.

6. Give the needed permissions to both of these devices: chmod 0666 /dev/raw1394 chmod 0666 /dev/video1394

7. Install Coriander sudo apt-get install coriander

8. Start coriander, with root permissions: sudo coriander

Notice that on reboot these modules have to be loaded again. The best way to do this is to write a script that executes at startup. You should now be able to get images from the FireWire camera!