Re: Advice Needed

[Peter Mount <peter@retep.org.uk>]

On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Tom Droege wrote:

> First, thanks for all the help so far.  The trouble with this media is that
> you get too many possibilities.
>
> 1) Use an ethernet camera.  They seem to cost about $300.  There is support
> shown for one model in the Mandrake hardware compatibility page.  But then
> I still need RS232 on something to run the dome.

99% of the ethernet cameras are platform independent. They are used by a
built in web server, most of them are actually linux/apache based.

> 2) Telnet.  It does not work on my home network.  One "expert" said he did
> not know how to make it work.   That is enough for me.  If someone with
> more ability than me does not know how to make it work, then I give up real
> fast.

Have you tried using the ip address rather than hostname? Could also be
because inetd on the remote machine has telnet disabled.

> 3) Remote Linux pc on the ethernet in the dome.  Looking at the Mandrake
> hardware pages, there is not a single web cam listed.  Plenty of expensive
> cameras.  So unless one of you knows how to attach a simple cheap web cam
> to linux, I give up on linux.  I sure would like to do this with
> linux.  This will help me learn the system.  Surely someone had been
> running little cheap cameras under linux.  But Mandrake did not list any
> unless I don't know where to look.

I do have a cheap webcam at home I'm trying to get working with linux, but
didn't have much success. When I get back (I'm 6000 miles away at the
moment) I'm going to try again. It's using a common chip set, so something
must work with it.

> a) Run the camera continuously (or a picture a second or so) on the windows
> machine and watch it from the linux machine on the local network.
> b) Open a DOS window on the Windows machine from the linux machine and run
> programs on the Windows machine.
>
> If possible, just what do I have to install?  OK, I will install the camera
> software that comes with it.
> Now what?

VNC Server. I tend to change a couple of settings. I can't remember their
exact nanes, but I think they are uncheck poll current window only, check
poll all windows. That improves what gets updated.

Peter

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Peter Mount
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