XPS M1530 Webcam on Ubuntu 8.10

My built-in webcam stopped working when I upgraded from the shipped Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10, and it took me a while to figure out the solution. Here's what I found:

First, if you're trying to use the cheese webcam application, it's currently broken with a number of webcams including this one. That threw me off. If you've opened cheese it might make other programs not work with the webcam until you reboot or reload the uvcvideo module like so:

sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo
sudo modprobe uvcvideo

Now, your webcam should actually be working with other programs such as Ekiga. The main program I want to use is Skype, which couldn't detect that the webcam was present. So here's the fix. Make sure you've got the libv4l-0 package installed. Then you've got to create a new shell script (call it skype-custom.sh or something) containing the following:

#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l1.so.0 skype

Make sure your shell script is executable (chmod a+x skype-custom.sh), and then edit your menu entry to point to that shell script instead of just "skype"