Enable Apple iSight Camera : Ubuntu 8.10
Have you been to a geek conference lately and noticed the overwhelming number of MacBooks and MacBook Pros in the audience? When I presented at OSCON this last summer it was by far the most popular piece of hardware to be seen. Now I don’t want to get into a conversation about Apple or OS X, but I do want to help all you MacBook owners running Ubuntu get your hardware working properly. This post outlines how to retrieve and extract the required firmware in order to enable your Apple iSight camera on Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex”.
Get the firmware
There are a few ways to get the required firmware. The first requires that you have an existing OS X installation. If you’re doing a dual-boot installation you can find the firmware at the following path within your OS X partition:
/System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBVideoSupport.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleUSBVideoSupport
You might also be able to find the firmware file at this link.. but for possible legal reasons (?) I wouldn’t know anything about that.
Extract the firmware
Once you have the required firmware you’ll need to extract it to your system. If you’re running Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” there is a package available that’ll do the extraction for you. Use the following command to extract and install the firmware:
sudo aptitude install isight-firmware-tools
sudo cp ~/Desktop/AppleUSBSupportVideo /lib/firmware/
sudo ift-extract -a /lib/firmware/AppleUSBVideoSupport
This should create a file called “isight.fw". Once you have this file you can safely remove the package and the AppleUSBVideoSupport file. Keep the isight.fw file for future installations. This will let you avoid the firmware extraction in the future.
note: if you are using Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” you can use the isight-firmware-tools package from the intrepid repositories.
Activate the camera
In order for the firmware to activate properly you will need to shut down your MacBook. Rebooting will not suffice! Enjoy.
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You really shouldn’t be linking to MediaFire for iSight firmware. This is absolutely against the EULA of the Apple distributed drivers and I don’t think it sends the right message to the community to have such blatant disregard for copyright law plastered all over Planet Ubuntu
Very messy and confusing information – please do it more step-by-spep, for dummies…
also missing information about how can we test if isight is really working, like with xawtv or any other webcam tool, and if the device will be /dev/video0 or any other…
There is another reason of why Apple machines are becoming so popular in Linux users: besides Apple prices were getting closer to x86 computers alike, on Apple machines, besides netbooks like eeepc or aspireone, we are not paying for a Windows Vista OEM licence which we will not use… (and MacOS-X is lots more useful in the meanwhile than Vista)
guest@macbook:~$ sudo cp AppleUSBSupportVideo /lib/firmware/
cp: cannot stat `AppleUSBSupportVideo’: No such file or directory
@Paulo – if you downloaded the AppleUSBSupportVideo from the web link you’ll want to use the command:
sudo cp ~/Desktop/AppleUSBSupportVideo /lib/firmware/
(note: I’ve updated the post to reflect this)
thanks, but btw i got from the hfsplus partition anyway! =)
some notes:
. ‘sudo aptitude install isight-firmware-tools’ asks where is ‘/System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBVideoSupport.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleUSBVideoSupport’ (in my case is at ‘/mnt/sda2/’)
. about ‘sudo cp ~/Desktop/AppleUSBSupportVideo’, it’s ‘sudo cp ~/Desktop/AppleUSBVideoSupport’ instead
. i started to have some usb-hub and mouse recognition (i hope this can have a simple solution, or being a problem not lasting too long…)
and later:
guest@macbook:~$ xawtv
This is xawtv-3.95.dfsg.1, running on Linux/x86_64 (2.6.27-7-generic)
xinerama 0: 1280×800+0+0
can’t open /dev/video0: No such file or directory
v4l-conf had some trouble, trying to continue anyway
v4l2: open /dev/video0: No such file or directory
v4l2: open /dev/video0: No such file or directory
v4l: open /dev/video0: No such file or directory
no video grabber device available
guest@macbook:~$
(after telling all these reports i were indeed did ‘sudo shutdown -h now’ before)
(after no, before, sorry the mistyping…)
the mouse restarted working, but there is no life signal from isight…
which are the best tools for testing isight besides xawtv? which ones you used successfully?
also trying to see if amsn can check some working webcam – nothing found… – suggestions about applications to try or configurations to set, please tell us…
tried also, unseccessfully:
sudo invoke-rc.d hal restart
sudo modprobe uvcvideo
sudo aptitude install cheese && cheese
(from https://wiki.edubuntu.org/MacBook/SantaRosa )
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/15293/
the message appears 80% of the time, and hangs the boot of Ubuntu is ‘unable to enumerate usb device on port 7′. How can i bypass this problem? (the very first time i saw this message were after following your isight instructions here, and i’m really affraid much more people may experience this behaviour as well…)
i don’t know if this can be helpful:
guest@macbook:~$ md5sum /lib/firmware/isight.fw
6d4b6764538e85ab9e7e15ed21b7a60c /lib/firmware/isight.fw
guest@macbook:~$
Another question, maybe important: should a green light turn on at the right side of the iSight len? it were turned off all the time…
important note: the ‘unable to enumerate usb device on port 7′ hanging boot message disapears when i remove isight.fw from /lib/firmware/ – which seems some problem may happen when simply placing isight.fw into /lib/firmware/
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AppleiSight
Yah, so I know it’s been a while, but i’ve searched and searched and have yet to figure out this problem.
I’ve done everything you’ve said, but i get this error message when i do the extract:
andy@Gloria ~/Desktop $ sudo ift-extract -a /lib/firmware/AppleUSBVideoSupport
** (ift-extract:13287): WARNING **: Unknown driver. Please report it to https://bugs.launchpad.net/isight-firmware-tools/+filebug with machine description and Mac OS X version.
** ERROR **: Unable to find firmware in the file.
aborting…
Aborted
What can i do to fix this? I’m running Linux Mint 8 currently.