BACKLOG

iSight in Arch

According the the Arch MacBook wiki page, the MacBook’s iSight camera should just work out of the box since kernal 2.6.26. Well that maybe the case on new hardware1, older hardware2 doesn’t have the iSight camera just work. One must first do some work, like finding the drivers AppleUSBVideoSupport. The driver can be found on any Mac OS X system, however it must come Mac OS X pre-10.6, so just just google it.

Install isight-firmware-tools from the AUR (you will need base-devel):

bash <(curl aur.sh) -si isight-firmware-tools

Once the drive is found and tools are installed the easy part is putting it all together:

# ift-extract --apple-driver AppleUSBVideoSupport
# sudo reboot

The driver will be ‘extracted’ to /lib/firmware/isight.fw loaded at reboot[3 with an udev rule.

  1. MacBookPro (6,2), MacBookPro (9,2) ↩︎

  2. MacBook (2,1), MacBook (4,1) ↩︎

  3. /usr/lib/udev/ift-load --firmware /lib/firmware/isight.fw ↩︎