I have an Acer TravelMate 4500 which has a builtin MMC/SD card reader. From lspci: Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments PCIxx21 Integrated FlashMedia Controller. I have tried Googling around, with depressing results. I know my 2.6 kernel has MMC/SD support compiled in, but obviously it doesn't have specific support for my device. I have found a binary module here but I don't know if it will work on my kernel (2.6.13.4 although I have no qualms against upgrading even further). I downloaded the module, but I can't figure out how to use it. I wanted to at least load it and see what happens, so how would I go about doing that?

Generally, how does MMC/SD mounting work in Linux? I read somewhere that it gets mapped to a SCSI device like USB drives, so if that's the case I would just mount /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdb1 or something? If I have the proper driver, that device should become available upon inserting a card right?

Also, if it doesn't look like I can get it to work, is there any way to use my digital camera's USB connection to transfer pictures? The software it ships with supports Windows and Mac OS X.

...I'm just kind of disappointed at the prospect of having to boot to Windows just to get the pictures off of my camera.

put the disappointment away...you can transfer your pics off your camera using gphoto2, which you can get from here...
you'll also need gphotolibs and i also use gtkam as my frontend....

There was a binary module about for the FlashMedia controller, but it's built against 2.6.11 and pretty much no-one has had any success getting it to work.

Basically, there are no Linux drivers for these TI FlashMedia controllers - there is one project still active in trying to reverse engineer the Windows driver, but there's only one developer so progress is still slow and in its infancy (no read/ write support yet): http://tifmxx.berlios.de

You don't need to mount sd/mmc directly if you have usb camera. Just mount camera with this:
# mount -t vfat /dev/sdx (camera location) /mnt/camera (create camera dir first). You could access photos here with simple file manager.

I don't think this will work without something acting to communicate with the camera. The packages detpenguin linked me to look like what will be required. The FUSE-based gphotofs looks promising, too bad there's not a pre-made Slackware package for it.

So it looks like I will be able to use the USB interface, that's good. Too bad I've got this fancy slot in the side of my computer that is completely useless.

Thanks for the replies.

Hmm, I have Konica Minolta camera and nautilus finds and shows my images perfectly. I can watch them normally in image viewers too.

According to the gphoto site, some cameras support the USB Mass Storage protocol, and are thus automatically accessible by a kernel with USB Mass Storage support. Since I plugged my camera into my USB port and /dev/sda1 was not automatically created (as would be the case with a USB flash drive) I am assuming my camera uses a different protocol.

to be sure:

type "tail -f /var/log/messages " in a console
and plug the usb connector in the slot.
see what your kernel has to say...

egag

Why it should be sda1? It could be, for example sdb1 (this is in mine computer), too. Run dmesg and check where your camera is located.

"usb 4-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2"
That's from both /var/log/messages and dmesg.

When I tried this I tried sda1, sdb1, etc until it ran out of them. sda1 didn't exist, and all the others said they were invalid block decices.

Here's a question: if it is possible to use my camera as a USB Mass Storage device, then it should auto-map like a flash drive does, if I plug it into a Windows system, right?

EDIT:
Well, I tried that and Windows detected it as a camera, so I don't know whether or not it would have detected it as a Mass Storage device.

When you run dmesg or look at /var/log/messages you must find the mount point mentioned. I don't know why but sometimes it becomes, for example /dev/sdc, even without partition numbers. I guess it depends on how many usb mount points are connected to usb controller.

libgphoto2 plus gtkcam should work for you in most case. You can download the packages from linuxpackages.net . Try them out. I have a Kodak DX7630 which does not act as a USB mass storage but it works with libgphoto2 plus gtkcam or gthumb. Make sure you setup device permission for normal user though.