USB Cams coming to life under FreeBSD9 (8?)
2013-05-13
recent improvements in webcamd and user space usb divers allow FreeBSD to use stock USB web cams
What a difference a few months can make.... This spring, I spent several days trying to set up a miny DX system based USB web cam server. As it turns out, many recent Linux distros require an instruction set not present on the little box while older distros do nat support the hardware sufficiently well to install via PXE (or any other way for that matter). Add to this some fickleness around power management, and you get a whole lot of frustration. FreeBSD, oddly enough, PXE-installed like a charm but was unable to talk to any of the several USB cams I tried. Fast forward to September 2012, and the new webcamd port now supports those same webcams out of the box!