[PLUG] getting a web cam to work in ubuntu 10.04

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Fri Dec 9 01:20:30 UTC 2011


On Thu, 8 Dec 2011 15:18:07 -0800
Victor Soich <vsoich at gmail.com> dijo:

>I went to a plug clinic to get my Logitech web cam to work a while
>back.  Now, when I bring up Skype, the camera doesn't come on.  When I
>"test" it in Skype, the camera comes on, and I can see an image of
>myself on the test screen.  When I stop the test, the camera turns
>off.  So...I know the camera works.  I just don't know how to make it
>come on when Skype starts.
>
>I don't know how to turn it on when I'm not using Skype.
>
>What I'm trying to do is to be able to use my web cam in Google+
>because I hear you can do 3 person video conferencing for free.  That
>is my ultimate goal.  In the meantime, I can't figure out how to start
>my camera otherwise.

Turning on the camera at the same time as starting Skype may be a
matter of launching two programs/services at the same time. This would
be trivial to do with a bash script, but first you need to figure out
how to turn on the camera. You can't turn it on with the script until
you know how to turn it on manually.

I assume you have poked through all the application menus (System >
Preferences, and System > Administration, as well as the Applications
drop-down menu. If not, do so, in the hopes of finding something that
turns on the camera. I suspect this will be fruitless, but it's easy,
so give it a shot first.

Assuming that turns up nada, open /var/log/messages in Gedit. You
may need to be root to do this; if so do "sudo gedit /var/log/messages."
Then turn on the camera via the "test" procedure in Skype. This will
probably cause stuff to be written to /var/log/messages, so you can
reload the file in Gedit and see what was added. Having said that, in my
experience, /var/log/messages is a very long file and sometimes it is
easier to (as root) rename it and reboot. This will cause a
new /var/log/messages file to be created, and it will be much shorter.

Another thing to do is to use dmesg, which displays all the things that
happen behind the scenes. You could start the web cam with the "test"
method, then do dmesg |tail, which will display only the last few
lines. 

Hopefully in all that there will be some clues to report back here.



More information about the PLUG mailing list