Mugshot 0.3.2 Released

What’s New?

The camera is functional again!

What Happened?

At some point during the Ubuntu 16.04 release cycle, there was an update to Cheese, Clutter, or GtkClutter that caused the camera preview to draw completely white.  I spent quite a bit of time during that cycle trying the determine the cause and provide a fix, but made no progress.

Recently I continued the investigation and gave up once again.  This time, I looked at the source for Cheese and found that it’s vala code was very similar to Python.  I restructured the camera dialog around Cheese’s source code and was able to see the camera again!  A few more tweaks and Mugshot’s camera worked just as well as it did before.

Downloads

Mugshot 0.3.2 is available to download in Ubuntu 17.04 “Zesty Zapus” and will land in other distributions over time.  Debian and Ubuntu users can install the latest supported versions via apt (see below) and other distributions can install from their repositories or from source.

# Debian and Ubuntu users
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mugshot

What’s Next?

Now that the core functionality has been restored, I can get back to development.  Mugshot is a simple app, so there’s not many changes to make.  I’d like to add more integrations (office suites, instant messaging) and improve the synchronization process with these integrations.