Comment 6 for bug 291723

I have the same issue (black screen using Logitech Quickcam Communicate Deluxe under Ubuntu 8.10) -- BUT, I found a simple fix. Apparently, the camera defaults to some "auto" settings (probably brightness or contrast). When I see the initial black screen, I take the camera and point it to my laptop's LCD (or my brightly-lit Blackberry screen, or some other light source). Immediately, the black screen goes bright white, then when I remove the light source, the camera appears to operate normally.

I am unable to find any utilities that let me configure or access the camera's settings in Ubuntu. I tried installing the qc-usb-utils and qc-usb-modules, but I didn't have much luck using qccam and qcdebug in terminal. I'm hoping I can find something that provides some of the functionality that I saw in the Windows driver (face-tracking, right-lighting, etc.)