Comment 31 for bug 120434

Ubuntu 8.10 - sadly, the R5U870 will not work on this as stated on the official site at http://wiki.mediati.org/R5u870 it does state in large wording that r5u870 is currently broken on 2.6.26+ kernels!

However it does mention one could try the userspace driver instead which you can find here:

http://www.bitbucket.org/ahixon/r5u87x/wiki/Home

I've used this and the good news is that it works on Ubuntu 8.10, but it isn't quite 100% perfect - ie in Cheese, seeing a 640x480 video, it's just fine. But using something else such as Skype or Flash (which use 320x240 video resolution) - yu get a cropped picture, that's not quite right (I see a mirror effect - ie two of myself).

If however you are happy with being limited to just 640x480 video or know of a way to fix for lower resolution...here's how to get it:

Packages - the site mention packages and Ubuntu is mentioned, but there's no packages available so you'll have to install from source however this is simple:

1. install what's needed:
 $ sudo apt-get install mercurial build-essential libusb-dev libglib2.0-dev

2. Fetch source:
 $ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/ahixon/r5u87x/

3. Change into r5u87x directory
 $ cd r5u87x

4. Compile
 $ make

5. It's very short and then you'll need to load driver so do this next
 $ sudo ./loader

If your camera is detected and supported you'll get something like this next:

Searching for device...
Found camera : 05ca:183a
Firmware : ucode/r5u87x-05ca-183a.fw

Camera reports positive microcode state.
Camera reports microcode version 0x0111.
Not doing anything - camera already setup.

Successfully uploaded firmware to device 05ca:183a!

(in my case, it doesn't do anything as my camera is already setup, I've already done the loader bit)

6. Next you'll need your system to be aware of this change so you need to re-modprobe uvcvideo so do this:
 $ sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo
 $ sudo modprobe uvcvideo

Now fire up Cheese (if you don't have it - sudo apt-get install cheese) and enjoy watching yourself.