I never have the need of using the webcam of my lenovo T440s. So in more or less a year of usage, I never found this bug: Skype doesn’t automatically find the integrated camera.
In general, all the currently versions of the available Linux kernels support many webcams drivers which now only support Video 4 Linux version 2 (V4L2).
Legacy Video 4 Linux API has been dropped, but some applications (Skype is one of these) only support the older version of V4L.
Found the bug, found the solution: preloading of V4L library!
ATTENTION!!! I tested the following procedure for an x86-64 machine.
Please, report all the bugs you can encounter if you use the procedure for an x86 machine.
Skype is a 32-bit application, so for an x86-64 machine you have to install the lib32-v4l-utils package, released from the multilib repo.
Then you can try to run skype in the following way:
For an x86 machine, you can try in this way:
What changes is the path to find the library.
But it returns an error like this, to me:
I solved the trouble in the following way (I know that is not the best way and it is not so elegance, but I’m very ignorant about LD_PRELOAD
and I don’t have enough time now to study it).
Create the file /usr/local/lib/skype
and fill it with the first code for an x86 machine, whit the second code for and x86_64 machine:
Then, change the access permission of the bash script:
so it can be executed not only by root.
Now, if you want to call skype without writing the complete path, simply create an alias:
and put in .bashrc, or in .bash_aliases if you have the following line in your .bashrc:
Close the terminal and open a new one, then calling skype
you will execute the script in /usr/local/lib/
.
In the end a simple trick: if you need to setup the parameters of your webcam, you need to install the package v4l2ucp
from official repository.
Happy hacking and GWH!!!