What an insane college.

Anyway, one solution might be to rebuild your kernel minus the necessary drivers for your camera. Then it definitely won't work.

yea....insane indeed....I dont like being away from my n900 even for a moment....I'm not very good in programming for maemo....so any kind developers here who can help me out??

together with getting rid of the icons for any program that uses the camera seems to work



ps:becareful to type everything correctly, it seems i've just typo'd somthing just now and forced a reboot...

does this work?? also, is this a permanent solution?? does it cause a reboot loop or somethin of that sort?? I dont have immediate acces to a computer....thats why I'm askin..

no reboot loops in my tests, you do need to run the command again after a reboot though (there are probably many ways to have a command automaticly run on boot, just search the forum and the wiki a bit)

Umm, I should've seen this thread before since I'm in the same situation.
I had the hostmode kernel installed, any phone with a camera isn't allowed, the teacher saw the device, I swiped the camera lens and it said Operation Failed.
Turns out fcamera isn't compatible with the hostmode kernel, so I just told them the cam's broken and got away with it.
Removing the modules should do the same, make the camera app and fcamera fail, I'll edit this post in a bit, need to check what the modules are.

ok, try this instead: Install Quick Launch, and in the settings, mark "Enable launch on shutter open"

edit:i'm guessing that option was supposed to do somthing else, but right now it just makes it so nothing is launched when you open the lens cover or press the camera button all the way

Two things:

1: If you look at the hardware docs on the N900, the back camera is actually entirely contained on a socket-ed chip, and can be extracted with the proper care and tools. That would clearly disable the camera, and remove the chance of using it until it's physically re-installed. The front cam really only works for skype and programs that specifically call out to use it, so that one is less of an issue.

2: Another option may be to just buy a solid rubber back for a device with similar dimensions. Cover the camera, and it won't be seen and can't be used.

Really though, this sounds like a bogus thing. "We don't want our students to use the most current technology." Really? What school are you going to? I can understand if they ban camera phones in some areas, like a gym, or a theater, but a wholesale ban sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. (Well, it would in the US anyway. )

Is enough for me, let me know if you need anything else :P
I'll upload it to devel in a bit

(the script renames /usr/bin/camera-ui to /usr/bin/camera-ui.disabled, changes the Xsession scripts that automatically start up the camera daemon at startup (so this should persist across reboots), and kills the camera-ui (cleanly) so you don't have to reboot the device whenever you enable/disable the camera)

fcamera will still be working mind you, I'll add an icon mover to the script in the future, for now, you can just mv it out of /usr/share/applications/hildon/ or use AppLocker.

Are they really going to kick you out of the college for having a camera phone? Tell them **** off.