How I got my webcam working in linux

1. Ran lsusb to get the vendor id and product id of the webcam plugged to the USB port. In the results found the line which corresponded to the webcam.
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 093a:2468 Pixart Imaging, Inc. SoC PC-Camera
Noted the vendor id and product id. In the above line, 093a is the vendor id and 2468 is the product id.

2. Now went to the website http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html and found the driver corresponding to the vendor id and product id.
In my case it was spca5xx

3. Running sudo aptitude search spca threw up gspca-modules-2.6.26-2-686 which appeared appropriate.
I then installed it. sudo aptitude install gspca-modules-2.6.26-2-686

4. Ran sudo modprobe gspca to load the driver.

5. Checked if the webcam was working using cheese.

Starting conky on shell startup

All my attempts to start conky automatically on Linux startup have been unsuccessful. Now I have given up on that and am using a few lines of shell script to start conky on starting up the shell. As the first thing I do after starting up linux is to start the gnome-terminal, I have added a few lines to .bashrc to check if conky is running and if not to start it. I will have to do with this until a better solution can be found.

conky_ps=`ps -e | grep conky`
if [ "$conky_ps" = '' ]; then
    conky -d
    sleep 1
    clear
fi