Well, some more details.

I have a USB "WeeCam" made by Alaris that Earthlink gives away to new
members.  Somebody signed up and gave me the camera.  

I have a program called "SpyCam" that's supposed to capture a frame from it
and post it to a web site.  Seems to work ok, but it has a problem which it
blames on a Microsoft Video DLL that if the machine goes into screen saver
or something, the caption (time & date) will update but the actual picture
won't.  There's an always-up PC that runs Windows 98, and I figured I'd set
up a web cam, but I ran into the update problem.

As far as I can tell, there are no drivers for the Alaris camera in Linux.
They specifically offer Mac drivers for OS 8 & 9 only, which makes me think
they're steering away from Linux.

I think I do have a fairly recent Mandrake on the system in question, I'll
have to see if I can figure out how to tell if it can see the camera, but
the reason the system is up all the time but not in use is just in case a
Mac user needs a Windows box to do some real computing.