After fiddling with stuff a little more I realized only SuSE was offering to open the camera pics in Konqueror. Digikam expected to see the camera mounted under /mnt/camera.Instead SuSE mounted it under /media/usb device xyz.I copied and pasted this mount point into my mass storage usb camera setting(in Digkam camera setup page) and all is well.
I was wrong about Mandrake, it is not automounting my camera like SUSE did.I am going to look into that.The Digikam manual didn't really cover the fact that it doesn't mount the usb device.Rather your kernel needs to mount it before running Digikam .Then you are just pointing Digikam to the mount point.I did see they have added directions on there site in the documentation section that tells you how to make sure your kernel supports usb and that it is actually running the usb support.
http://digikam.sourceforge.net/Digik...?id_rubrique=9