Video drivers for Linux

The other day I got myself a webcam so I could Skype. I checked beforehand that there were Linux drivers for my selected model—a Logitech QuickCam Messenger—before I bought it.

And then bought it, and found that the drivers on the Web wouldn't compile, due to changes in the Linux kernel. Bah, humbug!

After an evening and a half, I managed to part fix it myself, part follow patches Out There, to get it to compile. The installation process then tried to test it out, and threw a kernel error. After rebooting and trying again, it now complained that qcset (the part of the driver that allows setting the camera's parameters such as contrast, shutter time, etc) couldn't find the camera. I tried proceeding onwards anyway, and it ran xawtv, which was able to show video from the camera fine. But the test video button in Skype still isn't doing anything; and when I tried to Skype my father, he couldn't see video from me; and instead of video from him, I got a variety of patterns, changing every minute or two, such as this:

I can see this is going to be an uphill struggle to get it working. :-( Probably starting with reverting my changes to the driver and doing the lot again from the patches I eventually found online.