Sony VAIO FE21H Webcam on skype

Alright friends not a huge tip but still I, being new fan of Ubuntu, installed it on my media laptop…Sony VAIO… one might ask what is media laptop…well I had a bit of problem with my Sony VAIO some 1.5 years back and a key got stuck and as it goes with any Sony product there was no cheap solution at hand… At that time for some reason it appeared like a motherboard issue and I just bought another Dell laptop…later I realised that it was a keyboard issue so I invested in a wireless keyboard and had two lappies at home just like that :)…I figured that with wireless keyboard VAIO laptop will make perfect companion to my 32" Samsung and hence it got the name of media laptop. I use this laptop to browse without fear as I will never ever do any important work on it so am never worried of loosing..not that I ended up having any virus at all….and now with Linux I doubt if there will ever be any virus on this laptop….but anyway I have gone on a tangent… What I started to tell was a tip on how we can make VAIO’s inbuilt motion-eye webcam to behave and the tip goes as below… Incase your webcam is not giving good images on ur Sony VAIO, you may want to try this:

1. Goto System->Preferences->Main Menu
2. In Main Menu window click on Internet in left hand navigation under "Menu" and then click on Skype" in right hand under "Items".
3. Now click on "Properties" button.
4. It will open a Launcher Properties dialogue box.
5. In third field "Command" replace "Skype" with this line:
   bash -c 'LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype'

That is it. You should now have a properly working motion-eye with skype. There is more info on this link: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Webcam Ciao !!!