Have you been to a geek conference lately and noticed the overwhelming number of MacBooks and MacBook Pros in the audience?* When I presented at OSCON this last summer it was by far the most popular piece of hardware to be seen.* Now I don’t want to get into a conversation about Apple or OS X, but I do want to help all you MacBook owners running Ubuntu get your hardware working properly.* This post outlines how to retrieve and extract the required firmware in order to enable your Apple iSight camera on Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex”.

Get the firmware

There are a few ways to get the required firmware.* The first requires that you have an existing OS X installation.* If you’re doing a dual-boot installation you can find the firmware at the following path within your OS X partition:

/System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBVideoSupport.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleUSBVideoSupport

You might also be able to find the firmware file at this link.. but for possible legal reasons (?) I wouldn’t know anything about that.

Extract the firmware

Once you have the required firmware you’ll need to extract it to your system.* If you’re running Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” there is a package available that’ll do the extraction for you.* Use the following command to extract and install the firmware:

sudo aptitude install isight-firmware-tools
sudo cp AppleUSBSupportVideo /lib/firmware/
sudo ift-extract -a /lib/firmware/AppleUSBVideoSupport

This should create a file called “isight.fw".* Once you have this file you can safely remove the package and the AppleUSBVideoSupport file.* Keep the isight.fw file for future installations.* This will let you avoid the firmware extraction in the future.

note: if you are using Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” you can use the isight-firmware-tools package from the intrepid repositories.

amd64 package

i386 package

Activate the camera


In order for the firmware to activate properly you will need to shut down your MacBook.* Rebooting will not suffice!* Enjoy.
Other Points of Interest





Gå till artikel

Inlägget är automatiskt hämtat från Ubuntu Tutorials