Using Embedded Webcam on Sony VAIO VGN-SZ61MN

A non GPU related post for a change. Was having trouble using the embedded webcam in my VAIO laptop under Ubuntu. After a bit of googling I found this thread which then leads to this page.

This only works if you have a Ricoh webcam. You can find this out by running lsusb in the terminal and see if it emits any lines with the word "Ricoh" in. I have no idea why Ricoh and Sony are using non standard webcam APIs but that's another story.

In short, run the following and you will have your Ricoh camera running on your VAIO:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:r5u87x-loader/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install r5u87x
sudo /usr/share/r5u87x/r5u87x-download-firmware.sh 

Now I can finally get round to that skype video call. Cheers Linux.