FLIP camera? Video?

[whiteman]

Is there an "add new hardware" thing in Ubuntu? I have a flip video camera and a creative video camera hangng on the screen, so far ubuntu hasnt seen either. I tried installing that "phone calling app" and it said no camera seen.
In windows you install setup.exe files usually, in mac you have your dmgs....what does Ubuntu use? And how do you use them, I havent installed any apps yet. Oh I almost forgot, is there a fax applet app or something? MY Canon Allinone doesnt work as a printer but the scanner works with the scan app. Im not in front of my desktop right now so thats why Im using these "vague" names for things. Im usually more succinct.

[buccaneere]

The way that I 'discovered' my on-board laptop webcam (wih USB address) was by installing 'Cheese' from Synaptic Package Manager.

Once it installed, an icon applet for Cheese installed in the upper desktop panel. It searched for a default camera, and found the webcam. (it might have searched and found the cam AFTER the first time I clicked on Cheese).

[whiteman]

I used that synaptic thing to install the cheese with. I didnt see any other way to download it. Im so used to just downloading, dblclick. So I used Synaptic Pack Mgr, and it found cheese. I chose apply, then install. But it didnt install I got this error message
E: system-tools-backends: subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
I get alot of those "backends" What does it all mean?

[buccaneere]

Log out and reboot in recovery mode and then run apt-get update. Reboot again, then try to re-install Cheese, and see if it searches your cam...

[whiteman]

I did get cheese i9nstalled, I just didnt see it. It hasnt found it though. So I tried doin a search for webcam drivers and I found this thing spca5xx or somesuch. Anyway I tried using synaptic thing to load it, but it kept saying no file selected. I would click on it, choose file, then reload, applay, and it stayed in the top box. I would get a progress bar sayin "downloading files" but thats all I did. So i tried extracting this gz file.(It was in tmp dir) It created a folder with about a dozen files. But I clicked on them and nothing much happened. Im still not real clear on how to install programs I think. Oftentimes it just hapens by mistake<g>. Oh well. AAt least everything else is working good. Except my workgroups situation. I now have two. (One called workgroup which Id like to get rid of) But for now thats OK. Like to find a printer driver for my canon mp470, but I dont seem to be alone on that. Thanx

[D-cat]

Okay, a couple of things. To answer one question way up, Ubuntu uses the Debian software packaging system, programs come packaged in kind of like zip files with extra information in a format like software_name-version.deb . We typically encourage that all software be downloaded and installed through the Synaptic package manager because not only can it resolve dependencies before there's an issue with them but also you're limited to downloading from repositories where the software has been tested to work and not contain malicious code. One of the major problems in the Windows world is the art of social engineering to get you to download and launch trojans ( Alert! You have a Virus!!! Click here to download my program to get rid of it!! ). If you stick to Synaptic, they wont get anywhere in Linux. Also, installing software manually (from a .gz file) could break the package manager's ability to resolve dependencies, causing broken installs or other things to simply not work; it should only be done if there is literally no other way.

On backends: Backends are the sort of drivers that programs use to access you hardware. If a program installs but the "subprocess ... backends" fails, then the program will be there but it wont do much. You might have an incomplete, conflicted, or otherwise damaged install or you might have some program still running locking you out from properly updating (which is why I think Buck wanted you to run the update from the recovery console). Unfortunately, I'm not really smart enough to fix this one from a forum thread, it'd take a long time. Maybe someone in the irc server could help get this done quickly?

Next thing, from doing some searching, I think your printer will work if you go into the CUPS setup and configure the printer to use the Canon Pixma MP150+ gutenprint driver. This driver actually works on a bunch of Pixma printers.

I hope you can get some more help here in fixing your issues with Ubuntu and things eventually work out.