Hi all.

I am wanting to disable my laptop camera (for everyone), on a Fedora 14 system.

I am an absolute newbie, and after some googling, I found that /lib/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules was my file. I changed the line

to

After rebooting, and doing ls -l /dev/video0, the output had changed from
to

Saw the wonder? Apparently, there was an effect by changing the 50-udev-default.rules file, but there was still a rw permission for the group "video".


So, I did more googling, and arrived at /etc/security/console.perms.d/50-default.perms. This file didn't exist already. So, I created one, and it now looks like
I again rebooted, but ls -l /dev/video0 still shows
Anything else, that I may give a try?

Regards,
Ajay

I'm not a Fedora user, but my suggestion would be to use(as root)
modprobe -r <cam_module>
and then blacklist that module by adding a line to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
blacklist <cam_module>
Just so we're clear, you'll have to replace <cam_module> with the name of your actual module.
You can get a list of modules in use with the command
lsmod
although you might have to use Google to figure out which one to remove. Mine is called uvcvideo, so I would do this:
# modprobe -r uvcvideo
Be careful. Have a live cd on hand just in case. Playing with modules can cause instability, crashes, and can make your system unbootable.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks seven_six_two.

You provided enough information to solve my query. Thanks a ton.

In my case, adding the entry to "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf" (followed by rebooting) was enough, as it provided with the following two advantages :

1. The best solution, as it disabled the driver (lowest level solution possible).
2. This did not require any addition/removal of anything, only disabling of the driver.

As the root access is to be disabled, so this provides the cleanest, most efficient solution.

Thanks again seven_six_two.

Regards,
Ajay