[wellylug] USB and digital cameras

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <3EDAE54E.7020601 at paradise.net.nz>, Lindsay Hunter writes:
>Anyone any experience with USB and digital cameras with RedHat9?  

Almost all modern digital cameras are USB-storage devices (the earlier
ones used serial connections and the like to copy data across).
Providing the device is recognised as a USB-storage device when plugged
in, there's little or no work needed to make it available.

On my system (Debian Linux 3.0 == Woody), Sony digital cameras are
properly handled when plugged in.  For a couple of other digital storage
things I have to modprobe sd_mod, but otherwise they work fine.

The modules required are:

usb-storage (requires scsi_mod, or SCSI compiled into the kernel)
sd_mod (or "SCSI disk" compiled into the kernel)

For the ones that aren't immediately recognised I modprobe sd_mod
manually (I don't use them often enough to have gone to the trouble of
putting the right magic in hotplug, etc).

Once it is recognised as a SCSI device (ie, shows up in /proc/scsi/scsi,
or in dmesg), you'll have a /dev/sd* device (typically /dev/sda unless
you have other SCSI devices, or have plugged in other USB-storage
device).  

You can generally list the partition table on the device with:

fdisk -l /dev/sda

and you'll usually find there's one VFAT partition on it, which is often
partition 1 (although some do the zip-disk thing and have partition 4
instead).

Then:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt

perhaps with some of the uid, umask, etc, options just discussed on the
list, should make it accessible.  You can put a fstab entry in for it
providing you mark it "noauto"; if you do you'll probably want to give
it its own directory (eg, /camera -- which I use with mine), and mark it
"user".  (So I just plug my camera in and do "mount /camera" as a normal
user.)  For extra points you could set it up in the automounter.

I don't use Redhat often enough to know exactly where to do some of
these things (or have a Redhat system easily available to check) but
hopefully that's enough to point you in the right direction).

Ewen