T61: Nvidia driver, webcam capture, and VIM text editor qestions

[pricejn2]

I'm not sure if it is preferrable to post all of my long-standing issues/questions in one thread or not but as a first time poster to this site, I suppose it will pass.

I'm running Debian Lenny (2.6.24) on a T61 laptop with a nVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M. The webcam is of the built-into-monitor variety and is currently working (though only with Skype) using a generic UVC driver.

As far as the nvidia driver is concerned, everything works fine with the vesa driver while nothing works (black screen) with the nvidia driver. I've gotten a number of different errors over working with this problem, but the most recent that I can't get past is multiple "Module already built-in" errors that seem to be causing the video failure. I'll post the Xorg log/conf if it is helpful.

The webcam issues are related to capturing, possibly related to the vesa driver.

v4l-conf: using X11 display :0.0
dga: version 2.0
mode: 1440x900, depth=24, bpp=32, bpl=5760, base=0xd5000000
/dev/video0 [v4l2]: no overlay support

Finally, I've been trying to figure out how to use VIM at command line to edit and save files like xorg.conf in the event of a video failure but to no avail. If anyone has any links or information on how to use this (or another program) it would be greatly appreciated.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

I don't know anything about webcams and such so will let someone else answer that, but for a quick lesson in vim, go to a terminal and run the command: vimtutor

Keep in mind that you have to su to root to edit any file outside of your own /home directory.

Have fun with it!

[techieMoe]

If your webcam is working in Skype but not anything else, it might require that you use a newer version of Video4Linux (v4l). The webcam on my laptop wouldn't work with anything other than Skype out of the box, but after installing v4l version 2 I was able to get it running. It's a dependency for a couple of capture programs. The one I found was luvcview. It's not pretty, but it will get v4l2 installed for you.

[newd to linux]

Welcome to the forums!

I don't know anything about webcams and such so will let someone else answer that, but for a quick lesson in vim, go to a terminal and run the command: vimtutor

Keep in mind that you have to su to root to edit any file outside of your own /home directory.

Have fun with it!

If you don't know what you're doing and your sole interest is in learning to use vi or vim, I would suggest that you NOT su to root. Using vim as a regular user will allow you to do everything but save the file you're editing. It's better to play with vim with the safety net of not being able to save your files. Especially if you're playing with files in your /etc directory or other system critical files.