Most modern Linux distributions come with drivers for webcams. It’s highly likely that a your newly bought USB camera is plug-and-play on a Ubuntu machine. Here’s a little illustration on how to test these devices on these types of OS’es.

# Check daemon messages for any cameras
kim@kimlinux:$ dmesg | grep -i "Camera"
[   12.644286] uvcvideo 1-1:1.0: Entity type for entity Camera 1 was not initialized!
[   12.644364] input: UVC Camera (046d:0990) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-1/1-1:1.0/input/input12

# Check default video sources
kim@kimlinux:$ ls -ltrh /dev/video*
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 81, 1 Aug 27 16:29 /dev/video1
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 81, 0 Aug 27 16:29 /dev/video0

# Install webcam app
kim@kimlinux:~/Downloads$ sudo apt install cheese
[sudo] password for kim: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  cheese-common docbook-xml gnome-desktop3-data gnome-video-effects gstreamer1.0-clutter-3.0 libcanberra-gtk3-0
  libcanberra-gtk3-module libcheese-gtk25 libcheese8 libclutter-1.0-0 libclutter-1.0-common libclutter-gst-3.0-0
  libclutter-gtk-1.0-0 libcogl-common libcogl-pango20 libcogl-path20 libcogl20 libgnome-desktop-3-19 libyelp0 sgml-base
  sgml-data xml-core yelp yelp-xsl
Suggested packages:
  gnome-video-effects-frei0r docbook docbook-dsssl docbook-xsl docbook-defguide gnome-video-effects-extra sgml-base-doc
  perlsgml w3-recs opensp libxml2-utils debhelper
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  cheese cheese-common docbook-xml gnome-desktop3-data gnome-video-effects gstreamer1.0-clutter-3.0 libcanberra-gtk3-0
  libcanberra-gtk3-module libcheese-gtk25 libcheese8 libclutter-1.0-0 libclutter-1.0-common libclutter-gst-3.0-0
  libclutter-gtk-1.0-0 libcogl-common libcogl-pango20 libcogl-path20 libcogl20 libgnome-desktop-3-19 libyelp0 sgml-base
  sgml-data xml-core yelp yelp-xsl
0 upgraded, 25 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 3,002 kB of archives.
After this operation, 13.7 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
### truncated output for brevity ###

# init webcam GUI
kim@kimlinux:$ cheese &
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