HP laptop built-in webcam disappeared between Xubuntu 16.04 and 18.04

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Aug 05, 2020 at 07:48:19PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> I often hear Linux/FOSS Unix evangelist/zealot types boasting about
> how they have a Linux-only PC. If you encounter someone like this, ask
> them how they update their BIOS. You may well find that you get a
> blank look. They don't and how to do so has never occurred to them.
> 
> There _are_ Linux tools but only for a relatively tiny handful of
> machines, they're non-trivial to use, and people in general don't
> update their firmware enough.

I think it's only fair to mention the excellent work being done by
https://fwupd.org/ here.  I'd be interested to hear what you think is
non-trivial to use about that, given that it's integrated into GUI
software store tools, so you get prompted to apply the update and then
it's hooked up using a UEFI update capsule or similar so that it gets
applied at the next boot.  The bulk of https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/
by model count is made up of Dell and Lenovo devices, but most of the
Linux developers I know prefer one or the other of those anyway so this
might not be quite the gotcha you think it is these days ...

To be fair, my five-year-old Thinkpad is *slightly* outside the range of
those supported by the LVFS, so I only have this at second hand.  I'm in
no rush to replace it since it's still giving excellent service, but I
expect my next one will be supported.  I've given it a few BIOS upgrades
without Windows though: go to support.lenovo.com, bang in your model
number, select Drivers, select BIOS/UEFI, burn to CD, boot, follow
prompts; maybe not *quite* trivial, and you do have to remember to do
it, but it's not hard either.  It's a bit harder if you don't have a
CD/DVD burner, granted, but instructions are fairly easy to find on the
web: IIRC you need to run it through geteltorito and then you get
something you can dd to a USB stick.  That bit is probably outside the
range of something a naïve user could do, but well within reach for a
"Linux/FOSS Unix evangelist/zealot type".

Also, a respectable percentage of firmware upgrades are microcode
updates, which these days are shipped by a number of distributions
including Ubuntu and applied automatically during early boot.  Firmware
upgrades do still sometimes have other important fixes as well, but this
helps the general situation.

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]