[nzlug] Which webcam?

[Daniel Lawson]

>   He is a little pessimistic in how often the innards of a make+model
> specified device change without notice, - but it does happen.  

Just to follow up that point with a concrete example:

The D-Link DWL-G630 PCMCIA 802.11 B/G card has (or had, when I acquired
mine) no less than 4 revisions, each using a different wireless chipset
(and therefore had different levels of support under linux). I forget
which version maps to which chipset, but the chipsets used were:

* rtlink
* acx111
* marvell
* atheros

Of which the marvell chip did not work at all in linux, the rtlink and
acx111 had some buggy and limited native support, and the atheros had
native support but the particular version of the chipset wasn't well
supported at the time. All could be made to work with some varying
degrees of success with NDISWrapper, but this was a shim and not a solution.

This highlights the point that you need to understand which chipsets you
are using, as you cannot even rely on the manufacturer to re-use the
same chipset when producing a new batch of an old model of cards.  



Daniel