Unable to access the pictures on my Casio Exilim EX-Z9 on Ubuntu 10.10
 

I'd like to start by saying I'm a total Linux n00b. I only switched to Ubuntu yesterday and am still finding my way around, so please, if you could include as much detail as possible in replies I would really appreciate it.
So, as stated above I have a Casio Exilim EX-Z9 and am running Ubuntu 10.10. When I plug the camera into the USB port it appears in the list of storage devices as "2.0 GB Filesystem" but when I try to access it I get an error message saying:
"Unable to Mount 2.0 GB Filesystem
Error Creating Moint Point: No such file or directory"
I downloaded digiKam but that didn't work either. For a start, it recognised the camera as a USB storage device and then when I tried to access it I came up with this message:
"Cannot access the storage device.
org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.UnknownFailure: Cannot obtain lock on /media/.hal-mtab"
Any advice or solutions would be really appreciated, as I would hate for a new operating system to make redundant another piece of hardware I've bought.

Welcome!

sudo apt-get install f-spot

I never encountered problems with f-spot. Digikam belongs to KDE desktop. Maybe it's missing something...

So, as soon as I connected the camera I got
"Unable to Mount 2.0 GB Filesystem
Error Creating Moint Point: No such file or directory"
F-Spot couldn't detect the camera and when I tried to select it manually from the list I got that same error message again.

What do you mean, missing something?

I had thought of a missing dependency but it seems that this is not the reason for digikam's problem. Isn't there a directory
/media
on your box? If not create it by
sudo mkdir /media
sudo chmod 0755 /media

Actually it seems that the OS can find the camera but can't mount it in your file system. Usually the mount points reside in /media, so I guess this directory might be missing or have wrong permissions. You can check the latter by
ls -ls / | grep media
On my box this gives out
4 drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2010-10-26 08:39 media

Ok, so I ran the command and nothing happened, presumably because there was no such directory as I then made one and when I ran the command again I got: “4 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2010-10-26 16:23 media”
So, I suppose that means there is now a directory somewhere called media but I know neither how to find it or what I would do if I did.

Have you tried to import photos after that? Maybe it's working now with f-spot or digikam?
Both programs will probably try to mount the storage device of your camera (cf-card or whatever) in the file system of your OS. /media is the usual place to mount such things. If not existing the programs give out something like "Unable to Mount 2.0 GB Filesystem
Error Creating Moint Point: No such file or directory"

Yes, I've been getting that error all the time. I get it as soon as I plug the camera in and any time I try to select it from the list. I think I need to create a mount point manually?

sudo mkdir /media/CASIO
sudo mkdir /media/casio

you can try that... but it's a shot in the dark

if that's not working you could put the card into a card reader and try to read thru that...

Well, I'm not really sure that'll make a difference and I'd rather not go around creating a load of empty directories that I don't know how to access. I feel like I need to manually mount the device to a directory but I really don't know how to go about doing that.