KDE on FC4 (2.6.12-1.1456_FC4):

I installed digiKam 7.4 and it seems to work wonderfully; recognizes my HP Photosmart 435... as "HP Photosmart 43x (PTP Mode)"
However, digiKam displays the thumbnails from my camera, but won't download the photos. I've tried running digiKam as root, still the same problem. When I try to download, the errors I get are something like "Failed to retrieve file" or "Failed to download file" "Would you like to continue?" and none of the subsequent files can be downloaded if I try to continue.
I even tried to put the camera's memory card into my Lexmark Z65 printer (which I had a hell of a time getting to work under Linux), but I have no idea how to get Linux to see THAT.
Anyway, my main concern is to get the photos downloaded from the camera. Like I said, thumbnails are there, donwload is not.
Please let me know if there is any other information that I need to provide. Thanks!

Have you tried it in USB mode? If you want to give that a whirl, the digiKam FAQ has how to get it going as the first question.

If you want to try the USB mode, you might try mounting it from the terminal and grabbing the images that way, if you don't mind not having thumbnails, as you said, your main concern was just getting the photos.

Well, not yet; I didn't know how to switch modes. I will try that. What's worse about this issue is that I just installed the KDE environment after using Gnome for a while, which automatically detected my camera and worked flawlessly to download photos. However, after installing digiKam on KDE, the Gnome software that automatically detected my camera and woked well to download photos, isn't working any more since I installed digiKam. So, I tried uninstalling to see if I could get the Gnome camera software to work (I don't know what software it is), but it's still not downloading photos (same problem as I was having with digiKam).

Long story short, I'll reinstall digiKam under KDE and try USB mode. Look for updates and thanks for the tip

Well, after some mucking about, still not being able to get DigiKam to detect my camera in anything other than PTP mode, I found another way. I'm using the terminal command-line program, gphoto2!
I'll just cd to the directory into which I want to download my photos, plug in my camera and turn it on, then type in the following commands in a terminal:
# gphoto2 --auto-detect
then after it detects and lists the camera,
# gphoto2 --list-files
then after it lists all the files that are on the camera in the terminal window in a numbered list,
# gphoto2 --get-file 1-10
where 1-10 are files 1 through 10 (or whatever other number of files you may have to download.
I still like to use DigiKam as an album organizer and thumbnail viewer, but I have to use gphoto2 to actually load the photos onto my computer.
This is pretty much how I'll have to do things for the time being, until I get DigiKam to work.
Thanks!
-Ed

Good luck getting it all worked out. If you figure it out, I'm sure plenty of people would benefit from your solution.