Using a Canon EOS camera as a webcam in Debian with secure boot enabled
I recently started using my Canon EOS Rebel T6 DSLR camera as a webcam; Canon offers a utility for Windows and MacOS that allows this but not for Linux, so I needed to find a solution that would work when I’m using Debian.
Using a camera as a webcam in Debian is very straightforward, but if you want to have secure boot enabled then there are a few extra steps that you might need to take. The extra complexity comes from needing to sign the kernel modules for v4l2loopback, which is used to make the camera’s video stream available to webcams.
Most of the tutorials and posts I found online either didn’t mention having to sign the kernel module, or said to disable secure boot outright. This wasn’t an acceptable solution to me so I made this tutorial to provide a solution that lets the camera be used as a webcam while still keeping secure boot enabled. I was able to accomplish this on my ThinkPad X1 Extreme gen 3 running Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye).
This solution should work for any camera compatible with gphoto2, including many cameras by Canon, Fuji, HP, Kodak, Nikon, Pentax, Sanyo, Sony, and many others.
