Running the latest Mate on an XPS M1330. My camera's blue light is always on. I think that implies that the camera is on. When I run Cheese there is no change in the light and the camera works fine. Is there a way to turn the camera off in Mate when I am not using it? Thank you.
According to CentOS's page for this laptop (another Linux distro), the webcam used in these laptops varies depending on the screen.
Which one does yours have? Run this command in the Terminal:
lsusb
Knowing the chipset of the camera will help research Linux support for this particular chipset, if the light is normal or not and what other users may have done.
One way to "turn off" the webcam is to disable its driver:
sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo
Note that this won't re-enable when you wish to use a webcam application, so you'll have to run this to "turn it on" again:
sudo modprobe uvcvideo
To make it more permanent, disable ("blacklist") the webcam driver when Ubuntu MATE starts:
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
And add these lines:
# Disable webcam
blacklist uvcvideo
Then press CTRL+X to save. Again, you'll need to modprobe if you wish to enable the camera this way.
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