Genius Look 316 Webcam

I bought this webcam just because the box said “Linux support” specially with kernel 2.6.5, for $20.00 dollars I couldn’t resist, so i ran home to give it a try.

But when I plugged it in, no module was loaded, I checked the CD to found that it includes a proprietary module for kernel 2.6.5, mine is 2.6.17.13. When I tried to load it, failed with:

# insmod ./usbvm305.ko
insmod: error inserting ‘./usbvm305.ko’: -1 Invalid module format

Seems that it only loads on 2.6.5 kernels… or maybe it doesn’t load at all, anyways I sent an email to their support address asking about workarounds for this, I’m still waiting for the reply.

Google’ing around I ended up in mmejiav’s blog, he had the same cam with the same problem and a solution, Michel Xhaard has written a driver for it, this webcam vendor and model id is 0ac8:305b (Vimicro Generic VC0305 chipset according to Michel’s compatibility list).

It’s working fine now and for the price it’s more than ok, but for me Genius’s marketing is plain wrong, first I thought “oh cool, another company that seems to care about Linux users”, but then it looks more like “Linux supported… long time ago… if we remember right, drivers? what drivers?”