webcam (usb) access under Ubuntu

[Berco Beute]

I've been trying to access my webcam using Python, but I failed
miserably. The camera works fine under Ubuntu (using camora and
skype), but I am unable to get WebCamSpy or libfg to access my webcam.

First I tried webcamspy (http://webcamspy.sourceforge.net/). That
requires pySerial and pyParallel, and optionally pyI2C. Runing
WebCamSpy results in:

Exception exceptions.AttributeError: "Parallel instance has no
attribute '_fd'" in <bound method Parallel.__del__ of
<parallel.parallelppdev.Parallel instance at 0x83326ac>> ignored

This seems to come from importing I2C. The application window opens,
but there's an error message:

NO VIDEO SOURCE FOUND

Next I tried libfg (http://antonym.org/libfg). I built it, made the
Python bindings and installed it. Unfortunately the following:

>>>import fg
>>>grabber = fg.Grabber()

results in:

fg_open(): open video device failed: No such file or directory

Since the camera works fine in Ubuntu itself my guess is that the
problem is with the python libraries (or even likelier, my usage of
them). Is there anybody here that was successful in accessing their
webcam on linux using Python? Else I have to reside to Windows and
VideoCapture (which relies on the win32 api and thus is Windows-only),
something I'd rather not do.

Thanks for any help,
2B

===============
I am uUsing:
WebCam: Logitech QuickCam Pro 400
Ubuntu
Python 2.5