Wednesday 27 June 2007

$150 Bounty: 0402:5602 m560x webcam driver

I bought a fancy refurbished Acer laptop at a nice price. Ubuntu Feisty Fawn likes it all except the webcam, which is identified as 0402:5602, also known as m560x.

Well, I want it to work. I also want to improve the linux kernel, but I won’t be the one writing the driver, so instead I’ll use some of what I saved on this laptop to offer a bounty to the chap who does it.

I’ll pay by paypal $150 when Greg Kroah-Hartman of the usb-devel mailing list, or one of his deputies (e.g. Jiri Kosina) accepts working patches for this webcam and commits them for the upstream kernel; and where with the said patches I can get xawtv, ekiga and the like to enjoy the video source. like any other standard video source. The patches must be licensed under the GPL2, or GPL2 or later. The author retains copyright (naturally) or assigns it to the FSF.

To qualify, the patch, and earlier patch candidates (yes, they will make you tweak it and re-submit) must be submitted on the usb-devel mailing list, and excepting complications, the paypal payment will be to the email address comprising the Signed-off line in the patch submitted on said mailing list. I’ll split the bounty as joint contributors can agree or failing that, at my discretion. I expect one developer will leave a clear trail on the mailing list, terminating with the accepted patch, making recognition of the deserving author and subsequent payment easy.

The bounty offer will end after a valid claim has been made.

In any case it’s my intent to pay up to $150 to encourage development of such a driver and to pay it to those who write it and release it for kernel.

(It’s been suggested that this may involve working on sane-devel as well as usb-devel, in which case patches may need to be accepted for upstream submission by maintainers of both projects to qualify).

Information for starters:

Of course I’ll post the bounty notice in some of these places too.

UPDATE
I’m advised by one of the developers that more likely two drivers, m5602 and m5603 will hit the kernel; unknown timescales.
As long as the 5602 is supported I don’t mind splitting the bounty fairly between contributors of both drivers; in my view it is a common work that is now more conveniently expressed as two modules instead of one.
I expect other contributors will feel the same was as long as their device is supported.

16 comments:

  1. The actiongames project moved to sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/m560x-driver/

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  2. Sam, it’s over 4 months since the orginal post but I’m also interested in this driver and am willing to match the bounty of $150. It’s the only thing on my laptop that I can’t get to work. As soon as I can get the driver and do a modprobe and have it work I’ll be more than happy to part with some cash. (btw, at the time I’m writing this, Nov 2/07, the $cdn is about $US1.07, so I’d actually be paying about $US160.50 ;). It will be a good day for me when I get an email asking me to cough up. All I need is a name and address for the cheque.

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  3. Thanks for matching the offer.
    You might do well to post the offer on the mailing list at:
    http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=m560x-driver-devel

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  4. I will add 30 dollars to the bounty. Total is 300 + 30.
    Just contact me and I will pay for it.

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  5. I am in the same situation in that I am running Ubuntu on my laptop and the webcam is the ONLY thing not functioning perfectly, and i use Skype a lot so its really annoying that it doesn’t work! i am also willing to add to the current bounty with £150 (thats British pounds, so currently $304.19 USD) for the developers who get this working natively in the Linux kernel. I so wish i could do this myself, but although i have the motivation i have neither the time nor expertise :(

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  6. That makes the total bounty currently over $630

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  7. Rioting_pacifist4 April 2008 at 05:35

    Any news?
    If not ill add £35 ~ $70, to the bounty just remember to contact me to pay up

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  8. Is this bounty still valid ? I`m thinking about posting it on the www.linuxdriverproject.org - maybe someone will pick it up from there.

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  9. The bounty is still valid.
    Progress is made, see: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/m560x-driver-devel

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  10. I’ll pay anything up to $70
    I’m desperate!

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  11. Andrea Mastellone15 July 2008 at 08:09

    Hi, I am helping some developers and I jiust would like to give the names of the peoples most active.
    In my opinion, there are three people most active and I think that the grant is due to them.
    They are:
    Wilelm Duinker (first stage)
    Ilyes Gouta (middle stage and livecam program)
    Erik Andren (actual stage)

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  12. Hi, just wondering if the developers have managed to get this driver working?

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  13. sj; It’s largely working for lots of users but not in the mainline kernel yet.
    For advice I suggest you subscribe to the mailing list at: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/m560x-driver-devel
    and ask there.

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  14. Thanks for that Fabio - it looks like things are progressing nicely, and perhaps the real driver is not going to be kernel based after all…
    I’ll review that french site when I get some time, and if it works, I may be able to declare the bounty fulfilled and then I’ll have to work out who to divide the bounty betwen… but we’ll see after the test

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  15. I followed the instructions found on the “French” website (http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/webcam_ali) and it WORKS! Compilation and installation were easy and I now have a working webcam on my Acer 9300 laptop. Operating System is Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10, 64-bit! All good here. I use Ekiga. Just thought I would let you and everyone else know that this driver is working for me.
    THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

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  16. The english version of the french ali webcam tutorial
    http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/webcam_ali
    is here
    http://m560x-driver.wiki.sourceforge.net/howto_install

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