Monday, December 29, 2003

USB Camera!!!

For Christmas, Santa got us an Olympus C-5000 digital camera, 5MP, 3X optical, ~4X digital. It works fine under Windows, so how does it do under Linux?

Fortunately, the good people at LinuxQuestions.org had already posted what to do. I'll just summarize what comes up in the Fedora Core distribution. I did this under FVWM, working under GNOME or KDE may make things a little more automatic:

  • Plug the USB cable into the camera and the computer
  • Turn on the camera (uh, duh)
  • With no other SCSI device connected to the system, the camera shows up as /dev/sda1. So, as root,
  • mkdir /mnt/camera (if you haven't done it already)
  • mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera
  • Your pictures will now be in a subdirectory of /mnt/camera (which one depends on the camera)
  • Copy the pictures to a convenient location. Until you do this, the pictures are only in the camera's memory
  • as root, do a umount /mnt/camera. If you've got a window open to a subdirectory of /mnt/camera you may have to close it before this works.

Questions to be answered:

  • Can you edit /etc/fstab may make this a little more automatic? If so, then all you have to do is plug in the camera and mount /mnt/camera. Possibly you don't even have to be root.
  • If you have a disk mounted in the cd, does the camera still show up under /dev/sda1?

I'll have some photos up in a few days, and post a link to them.

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