I have been an Ubuntu user for a long time and one small bug in the Built-in webcam module has never been fixed on this awesome distro. I use a Dell Inspiron series laptop with Ubuntu linux on it and often come across this issue that the in-built webcam of the laptop does not start on using video-enabled tools like Skype chat or Cheese Webcam booth. I have not encountered this issue ever on other Linux operating systems like Fedora and Slackware.

Laptop Webcam

Till now the only, frustrating solution was to restart your laptop in-order to get the integrated webcam working. However I cam across a cool way to fix this issue and reload the webcam on your Ubuntu Linux system without re-starting your Laptop!

All You need to get your Laptop webcam on Ubuntu up and running without restarting the Laptop is to simply issue the following two commands in the same order;

sudo rmmod uvcvideo
sudo modprobe uvcvideo

However, this is a temporary fix and you will have to re-issue the two commands above, in that order, every time your Laptop webcam stops responding. Since this fix works perfectly for Ubuntu, it will work well with other Debian based operating systems such as Linux Mint and others. For, those of you who want to get into the details of the commands mentioned above, please see this.

I hope this solves your issue, please let us know in the comments section.

Image Source: http://goo.gl/TKMvn