Tag Archives: Ubuntu

Getting Sony Vaio VGN-CR35G/R’s Ricoh MotionEye USB r5u870 Web Camera working on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

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It’s been a while since my laptop (a Sony Vaio VGN-CR35G/R) has been running Ubuntu and yesterday, I updated my OS to the release candidate for Ubuntu’s latest OS (due to release in 7 days time; 10-10-2010 ;)) 10.10 codenamed Maverick Meerkat. It’s been irritating me for a while that I didn’t have support for the inbuilt web camera for this laptop (which is one of Ricoh’s MotionEye USB cameras; model r5u870).

I had tried looking for drivers a couple of times prior to this but always failed. Finally, I found a package that supports Ricoh’s r5u87x series and the installation couldn’t be simpler. Simply get this one package and you should be set!

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:r5u87x-loader/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install r5u87x
sudo /usr/share/r5u87x/r5u87x-download-firmware.sh

It should be all smooth sailing from there on out. You can go ahead and test your camera on Skype or guvcview. I do suggest you try the latter since it will allow you to play around a bit with some settings :)

Do note that every time you reboot, you would have to reload the firmware into the camera so you should probably make a bash script with the last line in it ;)

#!/bin/bash


sudo /usr/share/r5u87x/r5u87x-download-firmware.sh

I personally put this script in an executable folder and made this script executable so that I can access it quickly from anywhere. After boot, if I do need my web cam, I simply load this script up, confirm with a “Y” and I’m all ready to use the webcam ;)

This should work on prior versions of Ubuntu as well so feel free to try this out on Ubuntu 10.04 or anything prior to that :) If the web camera on your Sony Vaio is not working, installing the r5u87x package totally seems worth the (rather minimal) effort ;)

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Torrenting on Linux

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rutorrent webUI

rutorrent webUI screenshot (traffic statistics)

As of today, the primary OS on my laptop is Ubuntu and since torrenting is a good way to get open source applications (such as Eclipse), I thought I should definitely invest the time to get a decent torrent client. I’m not saying that Transmission isn’t a good client. I certainly can’t say that since I haven’t used it for more than 5 minutes. I simply lacks umph. It really doesn’t impress me as much as uTorrent does on Windows. So let’s look for an alternative client.

Using uTorrent with Wine is always a popular option, one most Windows to Linux converts happily embrace. Let’s face it, uTorrent is awesome. But I really wanted to embrace Linux which for me meant to stop using the mouse and GUI as much as possible (not that difficult for me) and getting used to native applications rather than applications via Wine. This meant no more uTorrent for torrenting and no more mIRC :( The alternative I settled for came highly recommended by quite a few users. And oh, look at that, it’s terminal based. Of course, I’m talking about rTorrent ;)

I have tried to install rTorrent before and failed. This time around, I had managed to get rTorrent to install and work fine but I couldn’t get a webUI for it to work. So I had dt walk me through the process. I’ll try to document as much of it as possible to help users going through the same issue.

If you want to see a couple of screen shots of the end result before beginning, visit the rutorrent website and check out the screen shots. The best part about it is the tracker based, per torrent and global settings along with the pretty amazing traffic plug-in which gives your multiple (group) views of your traffic statistics. It’s pretty cool ;)

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