Comment 4 for bug 287336

AFAIK, Intrepid switched from the "external" gspca drivers to the new drivers that were recently added to the vanilla kernel. This is IMHO a good thing, since it guarantees that future kernel releases will carry the driver. On the downside, the "new" kernel drivers lack the module parameters of the "old" driver, and the default parameters make the image very very dark.

Steps have been taken for a while now to move everything to V4L version 2. V4L2 devices can be fully controlled from the userland. So it may be that parameters have been removed from the module by choice (I'm suspect), and from now on we should look for userland tools to tweak such devices.

One such tool is v4l2ucp (v4l2ucp.sourceforge.net) which is in Debian unstable but not in Intrepid, I'm afraid. It is a desktop app, with a GUI that allows you to tweak all the parameters of a v4l2 device. Unfortunately it has no way to automate this (no command line interface) and the settings are lost on reboot.

To address the specific issue of image too dark I've written and attached a small C program that will set the exposure on a v4l2 device to whatever you want. It is thus suitable to be called from startup scripts.

Usage example: set_cam_exp /dev/video0 2000

Works for me, YMMV.

I'm not a C programmer so I can't really take this any further, but it would be a great idea if someone more skilled would expand this into a command line tool that can list all valid parameters for a v4l2 device (plus valid ranges if applicable) and allow setting them, like sound mixers do.