Updating the PS3 Eye driver

This week kaswy released a new version of his driver (V0.3) and there also was a new kernel release for Ubuntu. Some of you might want to update, but also want to keep a working driver, that is the purpose of this post.

Let's get started, go ahead and install the new Linux kernel using your favourite update manager (e.g. apt-get or Synaptic Package Manager). Reboot your computer after the update to make sure the new kernel is loaded (save the URL to this page so you can follow the rest of the instructions!).

At this point, you probably don't have a working driver, we're going to fix that. Get the latest version of kaswy's modified driver and extract it to a directory, e.g. ~/src/gspca-ps3eyeMT. It's important that you do not have a build of the old source code present in the directory you extract the source code to, you can prevent that by moving the destination folder to a backup location first if it already exists.

We need to verify the source will compile for the current kernel, in my case 2.6.27-12-generic. You can check your version with:

$ uname -r

At the time of writing, the source is set to compile for 2.6.27-11-generic, which is not what we want, as this will not work for our situation. But luckily this is easily resolved! Open the hidden config file ~/src/gspca-ps3eyeMT/v4l/.version and inspect it's content:

VERSION=2
PATCHLEVEL:=6
SUBLEVEL:=27
KERNELRELEASE:=2.6.27-11-generic

As you can see, the variable KERNELRELEASE does not match our kernel release. Edit the line to match your kernel and save it. Now we are ready to compile the binaries for the new kernel. Execute the following commands:

$ cd ~/src/gspca-ps3eyeMT
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo modprobe gspca_ov534 videomode=04

Your driver should now be installed and loaded!

Side note: I learned about editing the hidden config file from an explanation from vw_kubel.