LifeAfter becoming extremely frustrated at the difficulty of setting up stable interesting webcam packages I've finally admitted defeat.
I used to use vgrabjj, then I switched to 'camE'.
Each of these would break randomly; either quitting uploading, having font problems, or other random errors.
After a brief rant upon my livejournal a friend suggested writing a tool that would just dump a single image from a camera - then using that in a bash script.
So I hicked and I hacked and I produced a little program 'camgrab' that will just output a single .JPG file from a video device.
Wrapping that up in a little shell script with a call to ImageMagick to stick a date stamp upon the image I have a new working webcam.
Debian (x86) package available from my apt-get repository.
In other news I'm still on the lookout for a new job ..
I'm (yet another) Edinburgh SysAdmin / Free Software Programmer ..
For fun I was recently told Byte mark hosting offer a 10% discount for free software developers. Nice to see a company doing things like that when their entire infrastructure is GNU/Linux/Free Software based.
I think I'm going to use them.