Category: Audio/Video

Let’s Disable Your Webcam

In today’s article, we’re going to show you how to disable your webcam. It’s something I’ve seen folks ask before, and something someone contacted me to ask about. While I don’t normally answer questions via email, it did seem like a good article to write.

I see this question, about how to disable your webcam, quite a lot. There are some ingenious solutions, from sliders you can stick to your laptop to just putting a piece of electrical tape over it. Some vendors have gotten in on it and include a sliding cover that you can use when the webcam is not in use.

If you’re that paranoid, you might want to look for a laptop (generally) that doesn’t have a webcam – but that can be hard to find these days. In some cases, they’ll have a red light that comes on when the webcam is in use. Of course, the truly paranoid don’t trust that. And the really, truly paranoid people know their coffee pot is spying on them!

Well, in today’s article we’re going to share how to disable your webcam. It won’t be all that difficult. It’s something a beginner could do, if they can follow directions, because we’ll be using nano. So, anyone can do this…

NOTE: I only tested this with Lubuntu. That means it should work with any Ubuntu flavor and with any derivatives of Ubuntu. It should also work up-stream and in most distros, but I can’t say that those have been tested.

Disable Your Webcam:

Like many articles, this one requires an open terminal. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Once you have the terminal open, enter the following command:

Now, copy/paste (or type yourself) the following into that file:

The first line, the line starting with a # sign, is a ‘comment’, meaning that it’s there for you, the reader, and won’t be interpreted by the computer as an input or a command of any kind. This is pretty common and traditional. You can change that text to anything you’d like. Something short and descriptive is probably best.

Now, you’ve gotta save it. It’s nano, so it’s actually not that hard but might confuse some folks. After all, it could seem hard if you’ve never done it before, but this is how you save it with nano. You just press CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER Bob’s your uncle! It’ll save the file and close nano for you.

Finally, you need to reboot for the changes to take effect. The effect is permanent, more or less. If you want to undo it permanently, then just reverse the process from above. If you want to disable it temporarily, you can try this and it should work for you:

That should do it! Though you’d still have a non-working webcam the next time you rebooted your computer. If you’re going to take the time to disable your webcam, you probably want that behavior anyhow. Again, if you disable your webcam and want to truly reverse it, just remove the lines like I mentioned.

Closure:

I don’t really want to encourage people, but I won’t be terribly rude if you email me with a question. Just, you know, know that I have other things going on in my life and that I don’t actually have all the answers. I write about the things I know, the things in my notes, or the things that spring to mind when I am late with scheduling another article. Ah well, now you know how to disable your webcam.

On the other hand, you can feel free to email me questions you think I might be able to answer (Keep ’em simple!) that might make good articles. I could use your question as a bit of an intro fluffing device and then do a “Reader’s Questions” kinda thing. There’s a big difference between emailing me for support and emailing me with a question that might make a good article. There’s no pressure in the latter case, as there is no time constraints or expectations. So, feel free to do that – just don’t expect me to respond with a solution, and there might be an article that comes from it.

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How To: Make A File Executable

Today we’re going to learn something important, that is how to make a file executable. This is something everyone should know how to do. It’s not going to be easy to make this into an article, ’cause it’s really quite easy, but I’ll give it a shot.

One of the important things about Linux is that files have various permissions. You can read, write, and execute a file based on the permissions. This helps keep Linux a bit more secure, because files can’t be executed until you’ve given them permission to do so.

I’ll make this article as straightforward as I can, by trying to give you an example of how this works. We’ll create a file, make it executable, and then run said file. This should serve as a good example, so that you can do so in the future.

You’ll see a bunch of commands in this article. If you’re new, just follow ’em until the end and you’ll hopefully understand what’s going on, and see how to make a file executable. Trust me, this isn’t something all that taxing. I’m sure you can get it!

Make A File Executable:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal open, let’s create a new file. We’ll do that with:

Open love.sh for editing with nano by using the following command:

Enter the following text:

Now, you’ll have to save that. Just press CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER. That will save the file with the newly added text.

Now, we’ll make the file executable with the ‘chmod‘ command. That’s done with this command:

With that done, all you need to do now is execute the file. To do that, you just call the file by name in the terminal. As you’re still in the same directory, you’ll need to use ./ – so your command actually looks like:

With that, you should get a message saying that you love Linux Tips. Aww… Isn’t that sweet of you! We love you too! It was also a fun way to create a file, edit it, make it executable, and then actually executed said file.

Closure:

See? That wasn’t all that hard. I hope that method shows you a little about how to make a file executable. It’s a pretty basic skill that all Linux users should be familiar with. It’s not a very complicated article, but that’s just fine. At least we (hopefully) had some fun with it.

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How To: Completely Remove Software In Ubuntu

Today’s article is going to show you how to completely remove software in Ubuntu. This will also work for other distros that use apt as their package manager. It’s a pretty handy tool to have in your toollbox, because we’ll not only be removing software, we’ll also be removing any config files associated with said software. It’s not all that difficult, and anyone should be able to understand this article.

When you ‘remove’ software, be it with the GUI or with the terminal, you’re actually only removing the software itself. You’re often leaving behind the config files (if there are any) and the ‘remove’ may leave dependencies still installed. The reasoning for leaving config files behind is presumably so that you can reinstall the software and have the same configurations you had earlier in time.

As you can guess, that’s not always a good thing… It may well be those configuration files that caused some sort of error in the first place. It may well be those config files that prompted you to remove the software in the first place. Erasing and starting anew might be your only realistic path forward, especially if reverting to backups did not work.

So… That’s why we have this article. This article is going to teach you how to completely remove software in Ubuntu. If you want, you can still try removing software and reinstalling (as a troubleshooting step), and this then becomes one of your later troubleshooting strategies. Read on, and you’ll see…

Completely Remove Software In Ubuntu:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

When you remove software with the terminal, you probably do it like so:

That’s great. It removes the application and may even remove some of the dependencies it pulled in when you installed it. This is not necessarily a bad thing – but we want to completely remove software in Ubuntu, and this is how you do it.

As I said in the preamble, using the above command will likely leave your configuration files behind (if there are any) and some dependencies. With the ‘purge’ command, you’ll get rid of those configuration files. To do this, you’ll want to:

While that’s great and all, when you installed your application you may well have installed some other applications (dependencies), that is some applications that the software depended on. Those too may have config files related with them and to really ensure you’ve completely removed the software, you’ll want to do an autoremove. 

If you’re unfamiliar with the autoremove function of apt, the man page has it summed up nicely:

autoremove is used to remove packages that were automatically installed to satisfy dependencies for other packages and are now no longer needed as dependencies changed or the package(s) needing them were removed in the meantime.

You don’t specify an application with the ‘autoremove’ command,  you just run:

That should do it, actually. The last command should remove any dependencies that were installed and not removed automatically when you purged the software with the commands above.

Closure:

And there you have it! It’s another article! I still haven’t missed a day, and I’m well beyond my initial obligations. This time, the article tells you how to completely remove software in Ubuntu – and it’ll work in any distro that uses apt. It’s a pretty simple thing, but it’s worth knowing. Eventually, it’s bound to come in handy.

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How To: Check Your Hard Drive Temperature

Today’s article is going to teach you how to check your hard drive temperature (in Linux, of course). There are a number of ways to do this, so we’ll just cover one way in this article. It may seem complicated, but it’s not. This should be a pretty short article.

You should have a general idea of the temperature of components within your computer. The components have various operating temperatures and keeping them within spec means they’ll last longer and give you better performance.

Hard drives generally have temperature sensors and we’ll be using ‘hddtemp’ in the terminal to check your hard drive temperature. It won’t work with every hard drive, but it may work with yours. It’s a pretty easy application to install and use, so we’ll go over it as though you’re using Debian/Ubuntu/Mint or something that uses apt. A quick check says you have this available for other distros.

By the way, ‘hddtemp’ defines itself accurately enough, like so:

hddtemp – Utility to monitor hard drive temperature

Which is, as the article intends, exactly what we’re going to do…

Check Your Hard Drive Temperature:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, let’s install ‘hddtemp’:

Next, we want to start it as a service:

And we’ll want to have ‘hddtemp’ start with the boot process:

That’s about it for the installation. Now all you need to do is know which hard drive you want to check. You can get a list of hard drives by running:

Next, you’ll run ‘hddtemp’ as a privileged user and use the path to the drive you want to check. So, it’d look a lot like this:

If you’re in luck, it’ll spit out the drive temperature. If you prefer Fahrenheit, the command should look similar to this:

That’s really all there is to it. You can check the man page for other options, but this is how most folks are going to use ‘hddtemp’ on their own local computers.

Closure:

Well, this was a short article. I have a bit of a stomach ache, so picked one that’d be shorter than most. Ah well… At least now you know at least one way to check your hard drive temperature. That’s always a good thing.

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Remove Default Music Player In Elementary OS

It can be a little confusing if you want to remove the default music player in Elementary OS. It isn’t really all that clear immediately, so here’s an article explaining how to remove the default music player in Elementary OS.

The default music player in Elementary OS (eOS from here out) is kinda lame. There are many better choices out there. Once you’ve chosen a replacement music player, this is how you remove the default music player in eOS.

This was first asked on a forum that I frequent and I took the time to find the answer. I figured that I’d not been able to easily find the answer with a search engine, so I might as well turn it into an article. It’s actually pretty simple.

eOS lacks any handy GUI system monitor that I could find, so I installed one. You might as well do the same. With eOS, you’re eventually going to want it – though top or htop or even atop do the job just as well.

Anyhow, I installed one and found that closing the “io.elementary.music” process closed the music player. Obviously, you can’t uninstall that. It’s part of some bigger package and eOS does things in unusual ways.

With further digging, I finally noticed an application called ‘noise’ in the list of running processes. Killing it would kill the music player, just like killing the io.elementary.music process would. Finding this out pleased me, as that was the answer.

Remove Default Music Player:

With that information in hand and properly tested, I was able to give the answer. The answer began with telling them to open their terminal, which you can do easily enough. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With the terminal open, it’s just one single command:

It’s so intertwined with eOS that you might want to reboot after you’re done. You can do that with the following command:

And there you have it. That’s all you need to do. I’m not sure why eOS makes it so difficult to find this. I’m also not sure why it wasn’t widely published, but it’s online now. Technically, it was online before now -at my old site. This is actually an old article that was redone to suit this site.

Closure:

We are getting closer to the one year mark. It’s less than a month away. I’m probably going to take a day or two off and then get back to the regular schedule – though with maybe a little less pressure to get it done every other day. It’s great when I have a half dozen articles done and ready to publish, but not so much when I’ve run out of ideas and I need an article for tomorrow. Ah well…

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