1

I have a 64-bit Linux Mint 10 but it does not recognise my Lenovo Y650 camera.

When I try to open the Video4Linux Control Panel, I get the following error:

Unable to open file /dev/video0
Permission denied.

1 Answer 1

1

You apparently don't have permission to access the video device as your user.

The best way to fix this is to put yourself into whatever group owns that devices. A quick and dirty way to do this is with this command: groupadd -A $(whoami) $(stat -c %G /dev/video0) (adds your user to whatever group owns that devices node). On my system that would be video, but beware that if that devices is owned by root, you end up with your user in the root group (not advised!).

The not so good way to do this but that would work if your distro doesn't have a sensible group ownership of that device node is to open up the device to be read and written by all users with something like sudo chmod 777 /dev/video0.

11
  • This is what I get as an error message: "cannot access `/dev/video0': No such file or directory" Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 1:28
  • Wait now, "Permission denied" from your initial question is different than "no such file". Which is it? As root if you look in /dev is there a video0 node? Some other video node? Maybe you're just trying to use the wrong one? Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 7:16
  • My apologies. It's the latter now "No such file or directory." Btw, I think copied the error message directly the first time. Seems really odd to me as well. Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 14:52
  • What do you see here: sudo ls -al /dev | grep video Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 15:02
  • crw-rw---- 1 root video 10, 175 2011-04-26 14:43 agpgart crw-rw---- 1 root video 29, 0 2011-04-26 14:43 fb0 Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 15:33

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.