For the past 3 days, I have been desperately trying to connect my digital camera to my computer and download the pictures in Linux.

I am using SuSE 8.2 with a Kodak LS443 Camera. The camera is fairly new, but it should, in theory, be mounting as a mass storage device, so it really should work. However, it isn't.

I've tried gtkam, gphoto2, konqueror, and digikam, but I still can't get my pictures.
Digikam just flat out crashes on trying to load my camera.
Gtkam sees my camera, and will let me surf into the directories on it, but when I click on a file and tell it to save, the program will crash.
Konqueror sees my camera, and will allow me to surf through the folders, much like gtkam; however, it takes 10 - 15 seconds to go into each folder, each time saying it is either 'initializing camera', or 'stalled.' Sadly, it performs similarly to gtkam, when I tell it to save a picture, it just sits there until I cancel the save. It will not transfer any data, it just idles on 'initializing camera.'

Gphoto2 is the interesting case, it will connect to my camera, and will start to download the pictures, but when it hits a movie (my camera can record short videos), gphoto will crash and stop transfering anything else.

For the life of me, I cannot get this working and would appreciate any and all help.

My camera does not show up in kdiskfree as existing at all, even when it is mounted and visible in other applications, which I find unusual.

It also doens't seem to matter if I am root or not, the same things occur.

I'm afraid that my SCSI card (which I do not use in Linux, but is still plugged into my computer either way) might have something to do with this, since alot of what I've been reading is saying that the camera should mount as dev/sda1, but I don't see anything when I try to mount that partition, or any other sda partition.

If my message is at all confusing, I apologize, but I'm confused myself.

Thanks in advance for any and all help!

Jeff

linux likes to mount misc. devices as "scsi" as a matter of convention. Why not just remove the scsi card? ... or can you disable it in your system bios? or what about recompiling the kernel without scsi support? i wonder if you can still use those "misc. devices" considered scsi without actual scsi kernel support.... I remember coming across some Kodak camera options in my linux 2.4.20 kernel config... maybe it's supported..or maybe those were webcams.. i dunno... worth looking into, though.

What do mean by you dont "see anything" when you try to mount that partition? maybe the disk is partitioned funny. My parallel-port zip drive is mounting as scsi but most factory zip's use the 4th partition so they have to be mounted as sda4. maybe something similar is going-on. Try running cfdisk on the sda to take a peek at how it's mapped.

I dunno. i'm sure other folks have more definitative advice though

Does it connect by USB?
If so it may be a generic PTP connection, PTP = Photo Transfer Protocol, a (hopefully) standard protocol for USB digital cameras. Gphoto2 will work with any camera that conforms to PTP.

This may not help, but for aiptek pencams, you actually have to unload the camera driver (stv680, I think) from the kernel to have gphoto2 talk to it. It might be similar for your camera too, as gphoto2 comes with it's own drivers. To get video, however, the driver has to be loaded.

To answer various questions that have been asked, and to pose a few more:

Removing the SCSI card is not that great of an option for me as I do use it, just not in linux. I maintain a 2000 dual boot as I do quite a bit of video editing and I use an external RAID Device for that purpose.

As far as recompiling the kernel (to remove SCSI or the camera driver), I am learning linux as I go, and am not familiar with how I would go about that. If there are easy to follow directions, I could probably do it though.

What I mean when I say I can't see anything, the partition does not show up as even being a partition. I put in a dozen /dev/sda# and /dev/hd(insert variable here) and every one came up as "not a valid block device." From what I have read, the memory card should show up as a partition, but it does not in KDiskFree or any other application.

It is a USB Camera. How can I set it up to use the generic ptp protocol?

I'm not really looking to capture video, just to retrieve it from the camera. Gphoto seems to work (as far as pulling the pictures), but as I mentioned before, it hangs when it hits the first video file on the camera. Is there a way to either a. tell it to skip certain files, or b. make it retrieve the video.


What I really would like is a graphical solution. I'm comfortable with the command line (IE Gphoto) but my goal in setting up linux from the start has been getting it to the point that my grandmother can use... I'm getting closer, but am not quite there yet.

Again, any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Jeff