Steps required to get Philips SPC900NC webcam to work under Ubuntu (Dapper-Drake) Linux:

wget http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/snapshots/pwc-v4l2-20061020-042701.tar.bz2

  1. A big thank you to Saillard for putting in all the work for these drivers!

tar xjf pwc-v4l2-20061020-042701.tar.bz2 cd pwc-v4l2-20061020-042701

  1. if you try to run make now, it will fail because there's no /build or /source directory in /lib/module/`uname -r`
  2. so you need to get the kernel headers and softlink them in

sudo apt-get install linux-kernel-headers sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.15-27-386/ /lib/modules/2.6.15-27-386/build

  1. now make will work

make sudo make install modprobe pwc

  1. plug in webcam and test:

sudo apt-get install camorama camorama

I don't even want to talk about how many dead ends I had to go down to figure that out. At least I sort of understand how linux device support works now...