Will a 10.04 driver work on 12.04?

Question

I have a camera driver supplied by its manufacturer but they only say it works on 10.04.

My question is that this driver can be used also on 12.04?

Answer 1

My experience of v4l camera/media drivers is they ship a modified version of the Kernel's media source tree. This contains drivers for all sorts of video input. This might be augmented by an update script (like dkms) that updates it when your kernel is updated.

But if the driver is based on 10.04's kernel source tree, it's going to be ANCIENT!

10.04 shipped with a 2.6 kernel. Precise started on 3.2. There were a lot of changes between 2.6 and 3.x. And getting even newer, modern systems are on 4.x which is a slightly less aggressive change from 3.x but still...

Pulling an ancient media stack on top of that will probably not work out well.

That said it costs you nothing but time to test. Ubuntu is free. You can install 12.04 on another system and test. It might Just Work™ without an added driver. Many drivers are pulled into the Kernel directly over time. Or your ancient v4l might somehow work.

Failing that (and assuming the manufacturer wants nothing to do with this) you might want to look at compiling the latest 2.6 kernel on 12.04 and then installing your driver against that. It may still be incompatible but it's more likely to work. I don't know that 12.04 will definitely work on 2.6 but it's worth a punt.

If that doesn't work... It's time to look for new hardware. I'd look for something with drivers that are already in the Kernel. Staying on an unmaintained 10.04 is asking to be hacked.