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Notes on digital cameras and Linux.

The first thing I consider when buying any piece of hardware, is whether it’ll play well with Linux. Yeah if you’re a Linux user, you know the feeling. The “extra” research you need to put in. Thankfully, the rather expensive digital camera I bought last week works excellently with the SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional on my Thinkpad.

The first time I plugged it in, it was recognised as /dev/sda1 (where’d that come from?), and mounted under /media/usb-Sony-SonyDSC:0:0:0p1. I’d actually prefer a nice /media/camera or something similar. Anyways, from there on, I could use it like a normal folder – add, view, delete files. The only hitch was that to use the camera multiple times between reboots, you had to unmount it cleanly before disconnecting it – and that involved opening a terminal window and typing “sudo umount /dev/sda1″. Most inconvenient, if you ask me. In the “Computer” window on the GNOME desktop, an entry for “USB Hard Disk” would appear a short while after the camera was plugged in.

GTKam, a nice application for downloading and importing images from your digital camera, refused to recognise the camera. This was a pain – I didn’t want to go through the elaborate ritual of waiting for the camera to be automounted, navigate to a complicated drive path, more layers of folders beneath, and then drag and drop them into a folder in my home directory. No, sir – what I want is to plug in the camera, fire up gtkam, look at a preview of all the pictures in the device, and transfer them to my photos folder with a single click.

I observed that most of the Sony camera models listed in the gphoto database had PTP mode in brackets appended to the model numbers. I wondered if there was a “PTP mode” for my camera. A little poking around in the fat manual revealed that I could, indeed, enable PTP mode. And voila! The camera works fine! it doesn’t show up as /dev/sda1 anymore in the mount listings, and GTKam lists images like a charm! Of course, the camera’s recognised as a DSC-F707V, which it most definitely is NOT (it’s a DSC-W1), but hey – it works, and that’s all that matters! I wonder how things are for Windows users.

In a couple of days, I’ll post about digital photo management software for Linux.

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March 26, 2005 ·  Post to Twitter ·  Email this ·  Linux, SUSE ·  Leave a Comment


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