Comment 4 for bug 303215

Try having the following script running on a terminal window before you launch cheese.

while true; do echo > /dev/null; done

If your computer is anything like mine, cheese will behave much better when that script is running.

Without that script running, initializing the camera takes so long that cheese often seems to gives up on it and default to the gstreamer test screen (color bars and tv noise in the corner). Even in the cases the camera initialization completes, the frame rate afterwards is ridiculously slow, with tens of seconds between frames. All those problems magically disappear when the script above is running, and return as soon as I kill the script.