Digital Camera: Pentax optio S [solved]

[Guest sammy]

This is a question about how to connect my Pentax Optio S digital camera to my Sony Vaio Z1XSP in order to retrieve the digital photos into Lphoto.

 

My kernel is 2.6.11-6mdk-i686-up-4GB and I'm running the gnome desktop on Mandrake Special Edition 2005.

 

The weird thing is that the photos were retrieved fine under Mandrake 10.1, but now the camera isn't recognised by any of my digital photo programs.

 

Thanks for your help with this one.

[ianw1974]

Welcome to the board :P

 

Do you have hotplug enabled? This sometimes helps with devices on USB.

 

Also, have you applied updates to the system since installing it? Just in case there has been some system updates that relate to the USB detection of devices.

 

If you do plug it in, does an icon appear on the desktop allowing you to access it through konqueror/nautilus?

[JonEberger]

I had a camera that didn't mount cleanly. So while this sucks, I didn't mind doing it.

 

First I had to a make a directory under /mnt like /camera or something obvious like that (as root or su of course). Then I did a

 

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera

 

which mounts the camera as a fat partition to the /mnt directory strucure. /dev/sda1 is typically where I find the camera (I presume this has to do with the number of USB devices that I have continaully attached to my machine).

 

But I'd totally do all of the suggestions that Ian made first. Hotplug is key and updates are too.

 

Good luck!

[Guest sammy]

Thanks guys,

 

Ian: I have the hotplug service running at startup. I've also kept my distro up to date.

 

Jon: your suggestion is working, and I've created a script to copy my photos from the camera to my home directory:

 

#!/bin/sh
su -c 'mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/camera; cp /mnt/camera/dcim/100pentx/* /home/sammy/Photos_to_be_imported/; chmod a+w-x /home/sammy/Photos_to_be_imported/*; umount -f /mnt/camera'

 

I'm happy with this workaround until the next version of mandriva will hopefully fix it for me.

[neddie]

Hi,

Have you tried digikam? I'm also running LE2005 with the same kernel, but with KDE instead of gnome. My Canon Ixus doesn't require any mounting or su-ing, it's immediately recognised by digikam and since LE2005 it even starts digikam as soon as the camera is plugged in. gphoto was also very good at detecting what the camera was and grabbing all the pictures from it.

 

Using digikam has a couple of advantages, you can see all the thumbnails and doing a Select->New and then a Download->Selected will only get the new ones. Plus it flattens out the directory structure on the camera, so you won't have to change your script when you go up to dcim/101pentx.

 

I'm happy with this workaround until the next version of mandriva will hopefully fix it for me.