Camera support progress

[fishbowlkraken]

Thank you for your reply!
I am sorry to insist, and I know that insisting will not make the camera suddenly work
I just try to understand why it is so difficult when other similar devices already have working cameras .
Any Linux computer can accept a camera and they work at the very highest resolution, autofocus, adjust light, etc
I just checked and pinebook also has a camera. I don't know if works or not, but if does, should be the same? it is also an arm

First of all you need kernel support for your camera device. There are currently some features which are not supported, like autofocus and some resolutions and framerate settings if we talk of the rear camera.

Then you need a user interface to handle the images that the kernel driver generates. Pinhole is at a very basic stage. It has to be developed further.

Cheese has been out there for some time, mostly used for webcams. I would say it is mature enough. It needs to be modified though in order to be able to handle the camera image on the pinephone (at least the last time I tried).

Things are not so easy as they may seem. : )

Thank you for taking the time to explain this.
I cannot make me an idea, because I do not know how Linux (or any OS) communicates with the hardware.

However, I can see that Linux can communicate with hardware and with any webcam.
So, you say we need two things: kernel support and a user interface.

Ok, it sounds we need people working on this. Debian and the other distros have nightly updates, but to be honest I do not see any difference between a release and the next. The camera is never touched.
Is anyone actively working on this? who?

Nightly builds are literally just the code, as it is currently committed, being compiled and pushed out to the server as an image, so there's no guarantee anything related to what you want specifically is going to be in it. There's a lot of people up and down this project working on different elements of the camera, because the driver for it is being built from the ground up. Your webcam interfaces with Linux because either a different community reverse engineered the standard camera protocol being used by it years ago and have been iterating on it for quite some time, or the original manufacturer wrote an entire set of drivers for it that were then pushed out to the Linux kernel and/or whatever distro you're using. The Pinephone, on the other hand, is currently beta hardware, and you're using those drivers in an unfinished state. It's going to take time to figure out how to interface with every element of a piece of hardware that wasn't intended for use with this OS specifically, as it was initially meant to be used with a proprietary, device specific closed source driver with Android, not an open source driver running on what is effectively a heavily modified desktop Linux with a GNU stack.