Extra software for better experience
The “stock” installation of Xubuntu Linux only includes a small amount of software. To make Xubuntu a bit more useful to regular computer users, the Computer Recycling Project at The Working Centre installs other software we think will be helpful to new Linux users.
We’ve seen many people who are attending classes virtually. For good, or bad, Zoom has largely taken over the virtual meeting space. We’ve included it, and a couple of other webcam-related programs, Cheese and Guvcview, as part of our Xubuntu installations.
The problem – desktop environment won’t load
Recently, one of the people who picked up one of our Xubuntu laptops ran into an issue where the desktop would not load. We tracked down the issue to the fact that the Solid State Drive (SSD) was 100% full (no space left on the drive). When there’s no space left on the drive the graphical user interface cannot load because it apparently need to write some files to the drive, but can’t – so it just appears to try to load the desktop, then flakes out.
We tracked down the offending file: /var/log/uvcydnctrl-udev.log
This log file appears to be associated with a webcam control program, uvcdynctrl. We don’t install that program as part of our installation, but it’s likely one of the other programs (most likely guvcview) in our script installs it. None of the programs we install directly install uvcdynctrl, but guvcview has it in the “recommends” section.
This large file issue has been previously reported (as far back as pre-14.04), but since it appears to only happens under certain circumstances – it has persisted even in *buntu 22.04.
Temporary solutions
Removing /var/log/uvcydnctrl-udev.log freed up 220GB of space in our case, but the underlying issue is the uvcdynctrl program itself. We’re continuing to install all 3 of the programs mentioned above but removing uvcdynctrl from future installations in hopes this problem doesn’t appear for others.
In testing we found that neither Guvcview, nor Cheese were affected by removing uvcdynctrl. We have yet to confirm whether it affects zoom, but based on the reporting on Ask Ubuntu, it’s unlikely. We will follow up with another post if we discover differently.
Removing uvcdynctrl
All new installations will have this program removed, but if you’ve bought a system from the Computer Recycling Project in the past year you can remove this by opening a terminal (hold down the Windows key on the keyboard and press the T key) and typing in the terminal:
sudo apt purge uvcdynctrlYou will be prompted for a password. This is the user password we gave to you, the password you use for updating the system. If typed correctly the program should be removed. Feel free to reach out to the project if you run into issues.
There can only be 1
So far we’ve only run into this issue in this single instance. But because the problem was reported as far back as *buntu 12.04 we want to make sure that others that might have the issue do not. It’s important to note that “stock” Xubuntu/*buntu installations are likely not affected by this issue as they don’t install Zoom, or Guvcview by default. We don’t believe Cheese installs uvcdynctrl as it doesn’t list the program in either it’s dependencies, not it’s recommends. As hinted earlier, the likely culprit is guvcview, which we install as an alternative to Cheese. Cheese, while a polished, simple webcam program, does not work with as many older cameras as guvcview does, so we’ve provided guvcview as an alternative.