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It seems like it almost works. If I plug it into a USB port, lsusb tells me about the camera and correctly identifies the make and model. That should be proof that the hardware, driver, hotplug stuff, etc., is all working. Now to figure out how to get the pictures off the camera and onto the disk. I tried the gtkam tool, but it has the problem that is described in the FAQs: It says that it can't initialize the camera. After a bit of futzing, I got it to give me the "*** Error ('Could not claim the USB device') ***" explanation that is mentioned in at least one FAQ. But this is a brick wall. The problem is there are lots of explanations in the FAQ and in other docs that I need to get the permissions right on "the USB device", but nowhere does anyone say what the device is called. The string "/dev/" doesn't seem to appear in any docs or error messages, or even in /var/log/messages. If I knew the device name, I could easily type a "chmod ugo+rw ..." for it, but I don't know the pathname. There is a /dev/usb/ directory with lots of special files, but when I change their permissions to 0666, it has no effect on anything. I still get told that I don't have permission to access "the USB device". So it's gotta be something else. One curiosity is that I've seen a number of claims that one can just mount the camera as a filesystem and cp the files. A week or two back, when I was experimenting with this and getting all sorts of errors, I suddenly discovered that in fact the camera was mounted, and I did a quick copy of some pictures with a cp command. But I never figured out what I did that got it got mounted, and after I unmounted it, I've never again succeeded in stumbling across the incantation that does the job. I've also never found any documentation that shows a mount command for a camera. I've found them for other USB devices, but those examples don't suffice to construct a mount command for the camera. And there's a problem with the /dev/usb/* special files: They are all character devices, so mount instantly rejects them. I have evidence that, contrary to all intuition, the camera is actually called "/dev/sda". When I try "mount /dev/sda /mnt/camera", I see the camera's lights flickering for several seconds, and then it tells me that I need to specify the type. OK, I think, and add in a -t option with a guess as to the type. The camera's lights flicker again, and it tells me that's the wrong type. I go through the entire set of mount types listed in "man mount", and all of them fail the same way. So whatever the filesystem type is, it's not one of the types listed by the "man mount" command. It's also not any of the types in the /etc/filesystems file. The ideal solution would probably be an /etc/fstab entry that does the mount. I don't seem to find any examples of this, either. And unless I can find the proper type, this won't work, either. My conclusions: This is doable, since I saw it (accidentally) work once. But there's no way I would recommend this system to anyone trying to do fun stuff with a digital camera, until I can find a way past the frustration of trying to get the system to mount the camera. Any suggestions?
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