recently I decided to get a digital camera, and after looking at what gphoto2 did I figured no problems.
then I realised that I would not get a guarantee from a retailer that one would work under linux.

after a little reading on the newsgroups, I decided to get a USB card reader so that not only did I not waste camera batteries during downloads, it wouldn't matter what make/model I got.

I bought a Laser USB card reader with a bunch of interfaces (Compact Flash is what I'm using).
I plugged it into my Win98 box and installed the driver, it was happy, 5 drives appeared (the type 1 and 2 memory cards using the same interface).

I bought my camera (Canon PowerShot A70), took a few pictures, and put the CF card into the reader.
then I plugged the reader in, and USB Viewer reported that it had been found and it gave me some details (Hotplug takes care of a lot of fiddle work).

I looked at Mandrake's hardware monitor, and it had found only one interface.
and that interface was not the CF one.

a bit more reading and I fell across mention of multiple LUNs.
for any newbies reading this, LUN = Linear Unit Numbers. USB uses SCSI emulation, and apparently most SCSI devices have only one interface; the default Mandrake 9.0 kernel only supports probing the first interface, hence I wasn't seeing the other 4.

the solution is to compile a new kernel
I have an old P200 which I installed RedHat 8 on, and decided to practise it before doing it on my desktop. I found this guide which is great. I found it after I stuffed up

I compiled the stock Mandrake 9.0 kernel with SCSI_MULTIPLE_LUN selected, and after the reboot, I was able to see all the interfaces when I plugged the reader in.

my next step was to mount it, and then I was able to use it

the make/model details from USB View are Vendor Id: 0aec Product Id: 3050