How to setup the cameras on a Surface Go 3 for video calling (GNU/Linux).

What we are going to do:

We're going to download and compile libcamera, a camera support library for Linux.

Installing dependencies:

Open up your terminal and run the following command:

Select you distribution Select a distro Debian / Ubuntu Arch / Manjaro

Building:

Clone libcamera an cd into it

Build libcamera with only what we need

meson build -Dpipelines=uvcvideo,vimc,ipu3 -Dipas=vimc,ipu3 -Dprefix=/usr -Dgstreamer=enabled
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install

Testing:

Now you can run sudo qcam and make sure that both your cameras are working.

Configuring:

We need to give ourselves permission to use the camera without sudo

Now we'll create a script that will enable us to use our camera in apps that do not use libcamera whenever we run it.

But first we need to get our cameras name. You can get it running cam --list it looks something like this \_SB_.PCI0.I2C4.CAMF

Example output of cam --list:

Available cameras:
1: Internal front camera (\_SB_.PCI0.I2C4.CAMF)

Store that name somewhere, as we'll need it later.

Now, create a file and open it with your favourite text editor. You can call it start_cam.

Add the following line:

Now add this text, but replace CAM_NAME with your camera's name that you got earlier

gst-launch-1.0 libcamerasrc camera-name='\\CAM_NAME' ! \
    video/x-raw,width=1280,height=720,framerate=30/1,format=NV12 \
    ! videoconvert ! video/x-raw,format=YUY2 ! queue ! \
							     v4l2sink device=/dev/video42

Now you need to make the file executable and copy it to /usr/bin (replace start_cam with your file's name)

chmod +x start_cam sudo cp start_cam /usr/bin

That's it! Now, whenever you want to use your camera, just type start_cam and it will show up!