Sunday, January 18, 2009

Getting your web cam to work with Skype and Xubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)

Since Xubuntu 8.10, the video from my web cam is broken. When I test the web cam, all I see is noise, where as my partner does not receive any of my video. This is related to bug 260918. However, there's a simple workaround.

First of all, install libv4l-0. Open a terminal and type the following:

frederik@lolcat:~$ sudo apt-get install libv4l-0


Then, you need to make sure that the newly installed library is used when you start Skype. Make sure Skype is not running yet, then enter this in your terminal:

frederik@lolcat:~$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype


Go to the Options -> Video devices menu in Skype. Your web cam should work correctly now.

It's a bit awkward to type the above command every time you want to start Skype, so I suggest creating a script for it. Just open up your favorite text editor and put the following lines in the empty file:

#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype


Now save the file in your home directory under the name skype.sh.

Now you need to make the script executable. To do this, in the terminal type:

frederik@lolcat:~$ chmod +x skype.sh


Now you can execute skype.sh whenever you want to start Skype.

The last thing to fix is the menu entry. This is located in the file /usr/share/applications/skype.desktop. Open this file as root with a text editor of your choice and find the line "Exec=skype". Replace this line with the following:

Exec=/home/frederik/skype.sh


Be sure to replace frederik with your username. Save the file.

You may now need to restart XFCE for the change to take effect.

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