Setup a Webcam

This manual is partially adapted from the Ubuntu community documentation, courtesy of the Ubuntu Documentation Team, licensed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike license.

Checking for Compatibility

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) previously maintained a hardware directory. The FSF has has begun migrating this data to the community supported site h-node.

The h-node webcam site is a resource that will help users find information about if webcams work with all Free Software. Users are encouraged to submit hardware information to h-node because this will help the community know which hardware is supported and which to avoid.

Testing Your Webcam

Trisquel aims to provide "out-of-the-box" or "just-works" functionality for webcams; you should be able to plug in your webcam and use it right away. To test your webcam, start Cheese (Main Menu → Graphics → Cheese Webcam Booth), a GNOME program for capturing video and stills from a webcam and applying special effects. It uses the gstreamer library, which utilizes the video4linux2 API.

If the performance in Cheese is laggy, you can improve it by lowering the resolution (Edit → Preferences).

Identifying Your Webcam

To find your webcam model, open a terminal and enter the following:

lsusb -v

You will see detailed information about the devices connected to the USB bus. If you scroll through it, you should find some information about your webcam.

Disable Your Webcam

To disable your webcam until reboot, open a terminal and enter the following:

 sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo

To enable it again enter:

 sudo modprobe uvcvideo

If you want to disable your webcam when you reboot, edit your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf with a text-editor, for example with nano, by entering:

 sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

and add the following line to the config file and save it:

 blacklist uvcvideo

Now your webcam is disabled even if you reboot. To test the result, reboot and start Cheese again like described before.