It's 2:30am and I'm preparing for a big day ahead. It's my
stepson-to-be's Cub Scout investiture in less than 6 hours, and I want
to take pictures.

I figured that now would be a good time to borrow the Olympus D-550
Zoom that my mother bought recently and have a go at playing with it.

I didn't really pay much attention to the D-550 before, having no use
for the digital camera until now. But now that I have an excuse to use
it, I went to my brother, Alvin, keeper-of-the-camera, and asked him
if I could use the camera. I asked if he could transfer all his
pictures off the SD card onto his computer. He cheerfully nodded,
connecting the camera via USB to his 'puter and quickly transferred
all the contents to his machine using the program that came along with
the device.

Hmmm... I wondered. Does gphoto support this model?

I walked back to monster, my trusty old Pentium 3 running Debian
GNU/Linux 3.0 [kernel 2.2.19ext3] thinking that perhaps this would be
a neat thing to test.

My kernel has USB support enabled in it already since I used to sync
my Visor Deluxe often, but I haven't used USB in a while since my
Visor went kaput. I connected the camera to the USB port in place of
the Visor and proceeded to test whether I could get Linux to see it.

I had installed gphoto before, so all I needed to do was fire it up
and investigate. Lo and behold, said device was nowhere to be found in
the list of supported cameras.

I launched Mozilla and headed for the gphoto site and discovered that
there is now a gphoto2! Hmmm... a quick apt-get install gphoto2 and a
few minutes later, I try it.

Still no luck.

A bit of browsing through /var/log/messages clued me in that the
camera was recognized as being connected, but no associated drivers
would recognize and handle it.

A visit to Google with the keywords "Linux" and "Olympus D-550" lead
me to a post that reads: "I recently bought an Olympus D-550 and it
works great with linux.  I just plug the camera in to the USB port,
load the usb-storage module and then mount the camera as sda1."

My mouth waters. Enough clues to work with.

I cd to /usr/src/linux and run make menuconfig. I enable [M]odule
compilation of the USB Storage driver. A quick save of the new config,
'make modules' to get the new module binary and I'm in business. 

I run insmod usb-storage to enable the new module. The LEDs on the
camera blink rapidly indicating that there's a live connection between
the 'puter and the camera. I'm getting warmer.

I dash off 'mount /dev/sda1 /mnt' and the bugger complains: /dev/sda1
is not a valid block device! WHAT?!?

Hmmm... a quick peek at /var/log/messages tells me that I -am- on the
right track, but what is wrong?

I backtrack a bit and think... and tried... and tried.

The magic incantation that worked: mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt

cding and lsing through /mnt reveals a dcim/100olymp/ subdir and my test
pictures in JPEG EXIF standard 0.73, 10752 x 2048.

Stepdaddy is in BIZNEZ! Now to find a carabao slide! :)

-xen
-- 
___ eric pareja ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) User #8159 http://counter.li.org
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