11.10cheeseclutterframebuffervideo
When I try to run Cheese from terminal I receive this error message:
Clutter-CRITICAL **: Unable to initialize Clutter: Unable to find
suitable fbconfig for the GLX context: Unable to find fbconfig with
rgba visual
Obviously, seems to be something about this fbconfig, that I presume is connected to framebuffer. My SiS video card uses framebuffer to display 1280×800 maximum resolution. In previous versions I had used Cheese without problems.
Someone can give me more light about this issue?
So I missed a very obvious nomodeset in my /etc/default/grub file. I changed that to modeset. Now I have a better looking terminal.
Correct framebuffer settings for native FB resolution for my NV 550 Ti.
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash modeset video=uvesafb:mode_option=1280x800-24,mtrr=3,scroll=ywrap"
Testing a couple of Webcam tools because of the slowness of Cheese (Very slow indeed) as suggested by Geppettvs I have the following:
GUCView (As suggested by Geppettvs) which installs and works the following way:
The following line will add the PPA for this app, update the repositories and install the app:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pj-assis/ppa -y && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install guvcview
After which you can run the app with the command guvcview. Be warned that if your webcam is not in /dev/video0 it will throw a warning. You will need to change it to where your webcam is, for example:
guvcview -d /dev/video1 - In my case it was in video1, but it can be in video2, video3... Depends on what USB port it was connected to. guvcview does not automatically detect the webcam if it is connected in another one that is not video0.
This offers many options compared to Cheese:
Camorama - Much faster than guvcview and obviously MUCH more than Cheese
It has the same problem as guvcview in regards to finding the webcam device. You need to run it from terminal like this: camorama -d /dev/video1 if your webcam is not in video0.
There is also Kamerka but since it needed to download a lot of KDE libraries I tested this one in another Pc with Kubuntu and works excellent.
Best Answer
Cheese in Ubuntu 11.10 started using the Clutter GUI toolkit, which requires working hardware OpenGL support. Unfortunately, your SiS card doesn't support enough OpenGL to allow Cheese to work. More GNOME apps plan to transition to Clutter over time (we shipped an older version of Totem in 11.10 because the newer version uses Clutter), so this problem is likely to get worse for you over time.
This may get resolved in 12.04 due to some of the work being done upstream on the software OpenGL renderer.