I just got a new digital camera (HP M425) which I am not even going to try to connect to my debian box, but I was wondering if there is a list of recommended usb SD card readers that I could look into, to be known to work with linux. I am using 2.6.16 right now (kernel).

Thanks for any advice.

diilbert

I assume your camera has USB (perhaps not a safe assumption). I'm using SuSE 10.0, and when I hook up my Olympus, it shows up like any other USB-attached storage with automount. I find this to be much safer for me as my brother managed to clobber a 64Mb SmartMedia card of mine by putting the card into his reader rather than hooking up the camera. It corrupted the format of the card so it will no longer work with the camera. Still stores data fine by itself, but the only place I need it is for the camera, and it won't work there. If I could find the right card reader and an editor that can write to the sectors of the card, I could fix the format to work in the camera again, but haven't had any luck so far.

Long story short, I recommend using the camera's cable, unless it doesn't show up as normal USB storage when you connect it.

Any USB SD card reader will work.

As for the camera: There are 2 types. Mass Storage devices or PTP class. If you plug it into your computer and it isn't recognised the same way as a USB memory key, then it is a PTP class camera for which you'll need libgphoto. Either type of camera should work without too much effort.

So something like gPhoto should work fine with my HP M425 (which is a PTP class camera, since it never showed up in devices in Windows). Thanks for the pointer since I did not realize there was 2 types of connections.

diilbert

This page:

libgphoto supported cameras

says that it supports the M415, so it will most probably work with the M425.

Install it & see how you go. I think you'll need to add your user to the "camera" group. And you might need to tweak udev slightly.