[vox-tech] Convincing Kubuntu to see my digital camera

[Bill Kendrick]

Just FYI...

My wife and I had a gift-card that we decided to use on a new digital
camera.  This time a Canon PowerShot A540, which so far seems quite nice.
(I've really liked my growingly-decrepit 2.0 megapixel A60.)

The new camera uses SD instead of CF, and I only have a CF reader,
so I decided to try plugging it into my desktop's USB port.
I'm running Kubuntu 6.10 with KDE 3.5.6.  Voila!  A window comes up asking
if I want to browse the photos in folders, grab them with Digikam, or
neither.  "Excellent!", I think.

Well, sadly, not so easy.  I kept getting "Could not claim the USB device"
from Digikam or Konqueror.  I then found this recent thread over at
the Ubuntu Forums website that I thought I'd share with folks, in case
anyone else stumbles upon this issue:

  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=346840

I first tried making sure my camera's _exact_ Vendor and Product IDs
were in my udev rules file for the gPhoto2 library (which KDE's "Digikam"
and "Kamera" use).  No luck.

Then I noticed at the bottom that changing this:

  BUS!="usb*"

to this

  SUBSYSTEM!="usb_device"

in that same file (/etc/udev/rules.d/45-libgphoto2.rules) may be necessary.
THAT did it. :)

Now to take some nice 4 megapixel baby photos and see if this thing can do
better than 320x240 in the video department ;)

-- 
-bill!
bill at newbreedsoftware.com
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/