[Cialug] more fun with webcam / ibmcam

[David Champion]

I'm using the webcam package in a very klugey application - it's pointed 
at a phone, to show the LCD on the phone and how many messages are in a 
support queue. The phone system doesn't allow for any other sort of 
interface... so this is the work-around.

The PC it's running on was running Mandrake 9.1, and I had the "webcam" 
application running in a screen session happily taking a picture every 
30 seconds, which it would upload to a web page, and the support guys 
have that page up, and it does a meta-refresh every 30 seconds.

After updating the system to Mandrake 10.1, it now will take the first 2 
pictures, then on the 3rd one, gets an error:

v4l: waiting for a free buffer

It gets the same behaviour under the 2.6.x or 2.4.x kernel now. I did 
some googlenizing, and tried various things - but none seem to work.

As a hack to my hacked webcam thing, I'm now running it as a cron job 
every minute, and the .webcamrc is set to only take one picture then exit.

Anyone seen this kind of behaviour? I might try to get my other webcam 
working again (haven't touched it since the last LUG meeting) and see if 
it does the same thing.

-dc