[cpia] Hi!

[Luis Villa]

	Hi! I'm a newbie with Linux-based webcams (been using Linux for
two years now), and it looks like this is probably the best place to ask
some quick questions. Hope nobody minds too much. 
	First, here's what I need- a web-cam that'll plug into my laptop,
which has both a parport and USB (I'd prefer USB.) From what I can tell
the old QuickCams and the various VLSI cameras are my only options. So-
first question then- am I right in thinking that these are my only
options, or do I have other driver options?
	Second question- since I can't seem to find any old Creative WebCam 
IIs for sale, what HW would you all recommend that I look at? Has anyone 
had any bad experiences with particular vendors, or particular reasons 
not to buy a particular model? 
	Finally, what is the state of the drivers? I know I need to 
upgrade to 2.3.x for this, but what does "semi-functional" mean, exactly? 
I don't need anything particularly fast or efficient, but I really don't 
want to write any C just to get a web-cam up and running. All I really 
want is something that'll dump an image to a file every few seconds so 
that I can ftp it to a server. Is that reasonably easy to do, or will 
that require a lot of work? 
	Oh yeah, one other thing. Performance. My laptop is only a 
Pentium 200- will that be able to handle the driver and a reasonable 
frame rate? I would think so, but just in case... 
	Anyway, thanks for putting up with all these questions-
	Luis Villa

#######################################################################

     Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand.
	                  -Anonymous

#######################################################################