I still have some optimizing to do, but I can confirm that the VX-5000 is functional when using an older dual-core laptop, ZM 1.23.3, Kubuntu 9.04 and following the uvc mjpg_streamer guide found here: http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/Uvc

I am new at this stuff, so I don't have the camera tweaked out- I just confirmed that it recorded images successfully at 5-6 fps and 320x240 using the UVC trick. I will play with it later to see how much performance I can get out of it.

Things worth noting:

1. The camera uses V4Linux, I don't know if it uses version 1 or 2 but it seemed to work well with other apps in Kubuntu. Skype recognized it fresh off the install, as did xawtv.

2. I did edit the permissions of /dev/video0; I just gave it a chmod 777. If you're an ubuntu/debian person, check out the "installing zoneminder using apt-get" guide in the wiki.

3. I could NOT grab camera settings with zmu -d <device_path> -q -v as the wiki recommended. I have no idea why; maybe it doesn't like the uvc stuff.

4. Maybe its how my install worked out, but all of my event pictures have weird permissions; with the exception of using root, I could only open and delete the event pics through the zoneminder interface.

5. I had a known issue with pointing the mjpg_streamer output to localhost- when navigating to http://localhost:8080 to see the output, the browser would give an error about a www directory not being found. The workaround is to check the address http://localhost:8080/?action=stream OR http://localhost:8080/?action=snapshot. With Firefox 3, I could not preview a live stream- only still images that I could refresh like a slide show.

PM me if you want screenshots of what the technical mumbo jumbo looks like when entered properly into zoneminder. Hopefully this might give some hope to other people who own VX 5000 or VX 6000 cams, since general sentiment has been to avoid these things like the plague.

Since this user also used the UVC workaround for a more modern webcam, his notes and pictures may help you as well: http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13644