Basically what DroidCam does is it allows me to turn my android phone into a webcam and use it on Skype, Google+, or even as a surveillance device if I wish. And I chose this program over other webcam apps for android simply because its desktop client work on both Windows and Linux. What I didn’t realize is, its linux client seems to be for ubuntu and I’m running CentOS 7. Good thing is, its open source!

Still as a beginner with Linux, I went ahead and attempted to install it anyway. At first I followed the instruction their website here to download its installer. After I successfully downloaded its client and extracted the files out, I ran into this problem when attempting to run its installer.

Webcam parameters: '640' and '480'
Building v4l2loopback-dc.ko
make: Entering directory `/mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback'
make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd`
make: Entering an unknown directory
make: *** /lib/modules/3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.x86_64/build: No such file or directory. Stop.
make: Leaving an unknown directory
make: *** [all] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback'

After a bit of investigation I found out that in its installation it’s attempting to change directory to here

/lib/modules/`uname -r`/build

and it just so happens that it is a broken symlink. Where its suppose to be pointing?

/usr/src/kernels

It’s empty. But something is suppose to be there. After a bit of reading there’s suppose to be a kernel source, for compiling driver. I deduced that droidcam needs to install a driver so that programs can detect it as a webcam, just like on Windows. And to compile a kernel driver, kernel source is needed. So Google led me to this instruction here and installed the kernel-devel package (Because maybe I don’t need the full kernel source as the first bold line in the link suggests). I also found out that gcc needs to be install so,

yum install gcc
yum install kernel-devel

After running that I immediately notice a fix on my symlink mentioned above. So I tried to run the install again and voilà, it installed!

Webcam parameters: '640' and '480'
Building v4l2loopback-dc.ko
make: Entering directory `/mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback'
make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd`
make: Entering an unknown directory
make: *** /lib/modules/3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.x86_64/build: No such file or directory. Stop.
make: Leaving an unknown directory
make: *** [all] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback'
[jeangjenq@jeangjenq-centos droidcam-64bit]$ sudo ./install
[sudo] password for jeangjenq: 
Webcam parameters: '640' and '480'
Building v4l2loopback-dc.ko
make: Entering directory `/mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback'
make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd`
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/kernels/3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.x86_64'
 LD /mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback/built-in.o
 CC [M] /mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback/v4l2loopback-dc.o
 Building modules, stage 2.
 MODPOST 1 modules
 CC /mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback/v4l2loopback-dc.mod.o
 LD [M] /mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback/v4l2loopback-dc.ko
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.x86_64'
make: Leaving directory `/mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback'
Moving driver and executable to system folders
Registering webcam device
Running depmod
make: Entering directory `/mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback'
make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd` clean
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/kernels/3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.x86_64'
 CLEAN /mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback/.tmp_versions
 CLEAN /mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback/Module.symvers
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.x86_64'
make: Leaving directory `/mnt/downloads/Installers/Linux/droidcam-64bit/v4l2loopback'
Adding uninstall script
Done

That seemed to work! Droidcam client starts up when I starts it from the terminal, my android phone responds to its connection. And it works beautifully with Skype and my attempted facebook call.