how to find a camera in mepis?
 

I haven't installed to the hard drive yet, but can I have mepis find my camera from the live disk? what program would I need to use to do that?
It found my Palm Pilot with the kpilot utility, that was a nice touch..

Try camstream. Or aMsn.

or digikam

ok I found digikam and it "found" my canon powershot a410 as a generic camera, but it can't read my pictures off of it, what are some potential remedies? (is this error caused by it being a live disk, no downloads no added information to the disk, including pictures?

the live disk generally isnt going to do everything you want it to do. you really need to install it to get everything working right, and if its not working right then come to us and we will help you get it working right. the livecd is more for recovery/demo purposes.

I understand now :)

Try to launch gtkam as root. If you can read photos, then you'll have to adjust hotplug script, which is easier to do when the file is stored on a hard drive than on a cd-r ;).

you could try gphoto2 from the command line

gphoto2 --get-all-files

This depends which type of camera you have though