But the time (in this case Nov 11 09:06) will be the time when you plugged it in.
If you have several video4linux devices, for example a tv card your webcam may show up as /dev/video1 or whatever. If you have no /dev/video file, read #Troubleshooting. In this example your webcam device is named /dev/video0. If cheese starts, but does not find a webcam, you need to dig deeper. Here is how to find out your distribution. To install cheese, you need to know your distribution.
Ok, you are reading on, so there is still something left, maybe: This should switch on your webcam and you should see what it's recording. First let's try if it works out of the box, so, connect your webcam (if it's not inbuilt), open a terminal and start the application cheese:
