Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 on Ubuntu

I bought a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 today for a linux box (Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex). My preliminary research on this webcam found a few people getting it to work out of the box with Intrepid.

My story was anything but. The webcam did get detected by whatever hotplug manager du jour is for Ubuntu. However Skype test call wasn't working. After a few hours of google searching -- there goes my Saturday -- I fixed the problem and here are my notes.

• sudo apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio (another sound server du-jour)
• System/Preferences/Sessions, uncheck Pulse Audio
  
• System/Preferences/Sound, set everything to ALSA, set Sound Capture to USB Device OSS
• Skype/Options/Sound Devices, Sound In -> USB Device (plughw), Sound Out -> Default, Ringing -> Default

Now video is flickering. Very annoying. I have an ATI card with compiz running. Fix is to turn off "TexturedVideo" in xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
   Identifier "Configured Video Device"
   Driver "fglrx"
   Option "TexturedVideo" "off"
EndSection

iPhone goodness

So I finally got an iPhone for myself a week ago and it continues to amaze me. The amount of useful apps in the App Store is astounding. The features I'm using most often so far are the push email, sms, the camera for taking snapshots of books I'd like to find time to read, youtube, podcasts, and of course visual voicemail is just awesome. Some of the free apps I've downloaded and actually using include:

• Forex OTG for checking foreign exchange rates and charts (room for improvement there)
• Shazam for finding the name of the song playing on the radio
• Urbanspoon for restaurant picking
• AroundMe for finding a starbucks near me
• i.TV for TV schedules
• Twitteriffic for twitter
• Google Earth
• Google app for voice activated google search and google reader
• 1password for password syncing with my mac
• iTalk for recording notes
• To Do's for todo tracking. Though this is proving to be too basic. I might try Things or go all out for OmniFocus
• Fring for Skype and AIM
• MyMote for controlling my MythTV box
• FlyCast for online radio
• TouchTerm for ssh
• Apple Remote
• Evernote
• Tap Tap
• BigOven for recipe search

There's only a few apps I've actually bought and one of them is Ocarina. Just amazing.