Laptop camera not being recognised

Ask Fedora
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1

So my laptop’s camera is not working on any applications Cheese, Firefox etc.

lsusb

Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 04f3:0c4f Elan Microelectronics Corp. ELAN:Fingerprint
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 0408:4033 Quanta Computer, Inc. ACER HD User Facingthe camera
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 04ca:3802 Lite-On Technology Corp. Wireless_Device
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 04b4:6018 Cypress Semiconductor Corp.
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

So the webcam is attached. But,

ls /dev | grep video

Shows nothing.

The camera works just fine on windows.

2

What is the laptop model?

3

It looks, unfortunately, like this camera doesn’t support Linux well. See https://linux-hardware.org/?id=usb:0408-4033

4

Yeah I found a custom driver for it. There’s a script with the driver that patches the kernel with it but it seems to be build for systems with apt. Seems like quite a hassle. Is there a better way to do this for fedora?

5

Looks like this is the standard driver from the Linux kernel (uvc_driver.c « uvc « usb « media « drivers - kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git - Linux kernel source tree) that someone has copied and made a hacky little script to build on Ubuntu/Debian. The general process for updating a kernel module in this way in Fedora Linux is probably a good separate question here (we might have docs already someone can find and point you to).

It looks like the change is primarily to just… tell the driver about the device. So, hopefully, that will get included into the official kernel soon, and soon after into Fedora Linux.