Sunday, 22 February 2015

Xubuntu webcam fun

My configuration of my MSI Wind notebook as a Xubuntu based machine is coming along quite nicely. I still don't have an answer to offline blogging, but yesterday I added skype and dropbox, dropbox so I can access all my files, and skype so I can call home.

Dropbox just installed. Skype needed a dpkg -i command but installed without issue - or so I thought until I tested it.

No webcam.

So I tried cheese - again no webcam device detected. I assumed (wrongly) that the device driver was missing or incorrect and set out on a hunt for the correct driver.

Luckily I didn't find one.

Instead I found a slew of posts from people with similar problems and no answer, and finally a post with a reply that fixed the problem.

And it was a facepalm moment.

Apparently the MSI has privacy switch controlled by the F6 key to disable the web cam, and - you guessed it - the default startup state is off.

Hit the key, the webcam is enabled, and everything works. Colours are bit crappy, but it's a webcam.

I can live with that ...

1 comment:

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