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I did something very similar quite recently with an old Mustek DV3000 camera that had webcam functionality. I was shocked to find out that Linux actually supports it out of the box. The quality is trash so it's not really usable, but fun messing around with it nonetheless.

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Linux support for old hardware is absolutely amazing. No matter how arcane or weird your gizmo is chances are someone wrote a driver for it that is still in support. This is one of those ways in which the open source world is way ahead of closed source, where you're sore out of luck even for relatively modern stuff (for instance: Firewire cards).

I have the cam in the article, and it worked off-the-shelf with my Linux box. I temporarily had it set up with a Raspberry Pi as a security cam.

The driver support makes it a lot easier to build Franken-PCs with obscure graphics cards and accessories too. You wouldn't traditionally associate Linux with just working, but in the case of older hardware it is an amazing selling point.

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