Interesting problem with Olympus USB camera?
 

I have a USB digital camera, Olympus D-510 Zoom. And a strange problem...

Yesterday, I plugged my USB SanDisk flash drive into my computer to see how Suse 9.3 would handle it, and it worked beautifully! I was impressed. I found a snazzy little icon in KDE in media:. Everything on my flash drive was displayed correctly, and I noticed that it was an sda1 device.

Today I decided to try my camera (the SanDisk flash drive was removed). I plugged my Olympus camera into a different USB port. In KDE I browsed around, thinking maybe it would appear as nicely as the Flash drive. I found an icon called Camera, clicked on it, and it said it was an Olympus Camera, but not my model. Tried to read the contents, but got an error (wrong file format or something like that.)

But here's the strange thing: I saw the icon for the Flash Drive, remembered it was assigned to sda1, remembered that in Slackware sda1 was where I had my camera,
so I clicked on the USB Flash drive Icon. And lo and behold, all the contents in my camera was shown.

I browsed away from that window, and now I can't duplicate it, or read from my camera anymore.

So here is the deal: I know my camera will work in Suse because it showed me the contents correctly. It is just a matter of getting it setup correctly. Can someone please help me? I tried creating a new Folder called /mnt/camera and edited my fstab to mount sda1 to it. But I am getting an error "mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device" when I try to mount it. So I really don't know what to do!

Since Suse 9.3 uses subfs supermount, it's not suggested to modify fstab unless supermount disabled. ALso, I believe Suse uses "Media" vs "Mount" for USB devices. If you're using KDE in 9.3, navigate to the "Services" tab in Konqueror, and you should see your USB devices. So, I would return fstab to orig. state, then experiment with cold-plug (plug in with PC off, and see if recognized by hw detect during bootup) and hot-plug, for one device, then for both devices at same time (since you have multi USB ports) and note how Suse handles, and names assigned to each device. You can also navigate to /media to see the devices (assuming the mount properly via subfs). Also, it would be interesting to see if the camera memory card is read by Suse by using a MMC device, or if you have pre-built slots in PC - just slide card in. By the way, I don't recall the whole sequence, but if you go to Yast>Hardware, you have a way via the gui to probe your machine - that's a good way to see exactly how your card is ID'd in Suse.

Ok, I returned my fstab to its original state, but I didn't understand a whole lot of what you said. I'm very new to Suse! I'll try the suggestions you made, to experiement with allowing Suse to find the camera and Flashdrive on bootup, thanks!

I do have one tiny question: you said to navigate to the "Services" tab in Konqueror. I have been trying to bring that tab up: I remember seeing it readily in Slackware, but it seems it isn't visible in Suse by default. And I can't find a menu that gives me the choice to have it show up. Does anyone know where it is?

OK - I'm assuming you're running KDE instead of Gnome. The Konqueror file manager window normally should be set to show (from right to left) the file details, the navigator column, and on the far left - the thin column that shows your amarok player icon, the star icon (bookmarks) and so on. At the bottom of that column, is the "Services" icon. If you hover your mouse over the icons, you should see help text that lists what each icon is for. If you don't see the columns I'm trying to describe, hit your F9 key, it will toggle the display to show the navigator. The services icon is a red flag. Also, if you click on the "root" folder - and then click on the "media" folder, you should see all the folders created by supermount when you originally plugged in your camera and usb stick. If you click on those folder, and you have either the camera or usb stick in the port, you should see the contents (folders/files) on each device. Hope this is a little clearer. It's too bad there arn't some live interactive CD's for linux that could show this kind of stuff. The Suse user guide is quite good, plus there's a ton of good Suse help sites out on the web.

I'm so dumb, I found it fine as you described. I think when I was looking, I was looking for "Devices". I remember (I think!, maybe not!) seeing a Devices tab in other distros.

My camera and Flash Dive are listed fine, and I can browse the contents. I don't suppose I can rename those devices? Konqueror has them listed as 32M Removeable, 511 Removable, and my external HD is NEW VOLUME is all caps. Since Suse is finding these each time i plug them in, and assigning them on-the-fly in a way, i guess I can't rename them?

It can be done, but I wouldn't recommend it. The main thing is that you know the two basic ways you can browse and work with your files (besides viewing the files, you can copy them, delete them, rename and all that good stuff). Also, if you buy a MMC reader (Multi-Media Card reader), like the ones at Walmart or other similar stores, which typically cost between 10 & 20 bucks - - you can just remove your camera card, and put it in the reader slot. Then just hook up the MMC using the cable they furnish (usb 2). So, that gives you yet a third way.
The reason for doing that is you don't wear down your batteries in the camera, to transfer your photos to your hard drive, as the MMC just uses the PC's power. If you do a lot of photos like me, the $12.00 I spent on a Lexar MMC is long since repaid.

About "Devices" - - Suse 9.2 and prior version did have a "devices" tab in Konqueror. It was removed from KDE in version 3.4 (which is the default in Suse 9.3). Good luck Linda, . . . by the way, I think you're smart to use and learn Linux and Suse!