We often use our webcam for video chat with our friends, taking a picture, or even use it for video surveillance to see who's coming to the door. Well, there is another cool thing webcam can do! With a little help of CamDesk, we can put a simple widget that show our face on the desktop!
CamDesk is a free, open source, desktop webcam widget, that was originally created mainly as a desktop surveillance system to see who's coming to the door, while on the computer. Although other users have used it for other purposes. Like using CamDesk alongside CamStudio (Windows only) for screencasting.Download CamDesk
Camdesk is available for Windows, Linux, Chrome, and Android. Please visit its website and grab the appropriate operating system (in this case Linux).
Once downloaded, please extract the file to somewhere easy to remember.
Running CamDesk
Before getting it run, you should install all dependencies, those are:
- Video4Linux
- GStreamer
- Python
- libgtk2.0-dev
- libgtk2.0-doc
- libglib2.0-doc
CamDesk Hotkey
CamDesk for Linux only works with hotkeys, so remembering them is important.
- Start Webcam = F1
- Stop Webcam = F2
- Launch CamDesk Properties = F5
- Close CamDesk = Escape or Alt+F4
- Move the widget = Alt+Left Click and drag