AAO 110 webcam not detected on battery power

Hi,

My first post here, so first of all many thanks for all the valuable information available on this board. I was pretty new to Linux when I bought my Aspire One, but thanks to this board (and a few other sites), I was able to tweak my Acer to my needs (changed desktop, many application upgrades, WPA2 Entreprise, hardware mods, etc) and now have a very useful little machine.

There is one problem I can't solve though : my webcam doesn't work when the Acer is on battery power, it is not even shown in the System tab of Settings (in multimedia, webcam : N/A). When the Acer in on AC power, the webcam is detected (and works fine). I have read somewhere that the Acer could go into a power saving mode in which the webcam would be switched off when the netbook is on battery power, but I haven't found any information about how to change this, either on this forum (sorry if I missed it) or others. I have done many mods to my Acer, so kind of lost track of them but the problem seems to worsen, especially since I upgraded to the latest BIOS version.

Thank you for any help.

Benoit

 

No hint anybody ?

It's actually a very weird problem since the Crystal Eye camera works fine when my Aspire One is on AC power, but as soon as I pull the power plug, the camera freezes and disappears from the list of USB devices (in lsusb) ! There must be a config somewhere that shuts the camera down when on battery power, any idea what sort of process / configuration file could be involved in this ? Can this be BIOS related ? It seems to be worse since I got the latest BIOS version ? Thanks.

 

Try running a different distro that includes a webcam program, like Ubuntu netbook http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-netbook/daily-live/current/maverick-netbook-i386.iso, off a live USB flash drive under battery power. Quickest way I can think of to determine if it's a hardware or software problem.