Yesterday at the client's place Debian 6 was installed on one spare machine and the attendance system was installed without the camera temporarily on it. Although the plan was to avoid running the scripts as root, the problem was that whenever the user ran the script, the photos and csv files are created with user's ownership and group. This made the files easy to edit and remove the bad records. Therefore I had to put everything in a root owned container and the sudoer's file was edited to allow the user only this particular command as root. Thus all data was root owned and inaccessible to the user.
Maybe some experts on the list can suggest how to make a command run as user but keep the data generated from it safe from editing by the user.
Today I bought the web cam iBall 8.0 Face2Face. It worked fine in my Ubuntu 10.04 netbook. It was detected by Debian 6 but worked only in the GUI using the 'cheese' utility. It did not work with 'streamer'. After spending half a day with different options, finally in the evening, I had to knock off Debian and install Ubuntu 10.04. The script works fine. However the "^$USER" had to be changed to "$USER", only then the fgrep -x options work (in all systems). Ubuntu had to be tweaked to remove a lot of user access to disks and devices, something that is natural in Debian.
Everything is set properly and tomorrow will be the D-day when it will be used by the employees. Thanks to everyone who helped in making this a success.