Debian Squeeze

Zoneminder on Debian Squeeze

Installation of Zoneminder on an Squeeze System

The installation on an Debian system is very easy, because the complete zoneminder software is packaged for all Debian platforms. The current version in Squeeze for Zoneminder is 1.24.2.

Preparations

If you will not use USB or IP cameras please be sure the capture card is working well. First be sure the card supported by the kernel. You can test this with a simple lspci -v with root privileges. Every channel will be shown as a seperate entry. Look for something similar ...SAA71xx....
Take also a look at the used kernel modul.

...
04:08.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7130 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Philips Semiconductors Behold TV 401
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 20
        Memory at fdcff000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1
        Kernel driver in use: saa7134

04:09.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7130 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Philips Semiconductors Behold TV 401
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 19
        Memory at fdcfe000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1
        Kernel driver in use: saa7134

04:0a.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7130 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 01))
        Subsystem: Philips Semiconductors Behold TV 401
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 18
        Memory at fdcfd000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1
        Kernel driver in use: saa7134

04:0b.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7130 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Philips Semiconductors Behold TV 401
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 16
        Memory at fdcfc000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1
        Kernel driver in use: saa7134

04:0c.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7130 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Philips Semiconductors Behold TV 401
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 20
        Memory at fdcfb000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1
        Kernel driver in use: saa7134

04:0d.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7130 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Philips Semiconductors Behold TV 401
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 19
        Memory at fdcfa000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1
        Kernel driver in use: saa7134

04:0e.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7130 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Philips Semiconductors Behold TV 401
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 18
        Memory at fdcf9000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1
        Kernel driver in use: saa7134

04:0f.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7130 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Philips Semiconductors Behold TV 401
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 16
        Memory at fdcf8000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1
        Kernel driver in use: saa7134
...

As you can see there are 8 channels. We will find them (hopefully :-) )in the devfs filesystem.

ls -ls /dev/video*
0 crw-rw----+ 1 root video 81,  0 30. Jul 15:18 /dev/video0
0 crw-rw----+ 1 root video 81,  2 30. Jul 15:18 /dev/video1
0 crw-rw----+ 1 root video 81,  4 30. Jul 15:43 /dev/video2
0 crw-rw----+ 1 root video 81,  6 30. Jul 15:43 /dev/video3
0 crw-rw----+ 1 root video 81,  8 30. Jul 15:17 /dev/video4
0 crw-rw----+ 1 root video 81, 10 30. Jul 15:17 /dev/video5
0 crw-rw----+ 1 root video 81, 12 30. Jul 15:17 /dev/video6
0 crw-rw----+ 1 root video 81, 14 30. Jul 15:17 /dev/video7

That looks not bad, but there will be problems later. We see every entry is owend by the user 'root' und the group 'video'. But zoneminder will run with www-data rights, so with this constellation zoneminder can't access the devfs entrys. So the easiest way ist to used a special udev rule that changed the ownership of the dev entrys. Let's create this rule. Create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/90-zoneminder.rules.

vi /etc/udev/rules.d/90-zoneminder.rules

and put the following stuff into, this will set the mode of the /dev/video* files to 0666

# allow non-privileged users to access the /dev/video* files
SUBSYSTEM!="video4linux", GOTO="zm_rules_end"
SUBSYSTEM=="video4linux",       MODE="0666",     GROUP="video"
LABEL="zm_rules_end"

After reloading the udev rules the entrys will look like this:

ls -ls /dev/video*
0 crw-rw-rw-+ 1 root video 81,  0 30. Jul 15:18 /dev/video0
0 crw-rw-rw-+ 1 root video 81,  2 30. Jul 15:18 /dev/video1
0 crw-rw-rw-+ 1 root video 81,  4 30. Jul 15:43 /dev/video2
0 crw-rw-rw-+ 1 root video 81,  6 30. Jul 15:43 /dev/video3
0 crw-rw-rw-+ 1 root video 81,  8 30. Jul 15:17 /dev/video4
0 crw-rw-rw-+ 1 root video 81, 10 30. Jul 15:17 /dev/video5
0 crw-rw-rw-+ 1 root video 81, 12 30. Jul 15:17 /dev/video6
0 crw-rw-rw-+ 1 root video 81, 14 30. Jul 15:17 /dev/video7

Installation

The installation is really simple, just type apt-get install zoneminder with root privileges.

That's all. Now you have to setup your zoneminder under http://localhost/zm .