[Techtalk] mounting a USB camera

[John Clarke]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 11:56:33 +0200, Hamster wrote:

> I'll probably just stick with gphoto2 I guess for I now. It would've been
> nice to mount it as a filesystem, but not nice enough to warrant the
> purchase of extra hardware.

the extra hardware is cheap - i paid AU$38 for my usb cf reader 12
months ago.  if you only have small cf cards the speed probably doesn't
matter, but i have 2 x 512MB and it takes forever to download all the
images from a full card.  even a full 128MB card takes a long time.

i also found the cf reader to be very useful when travelling with the
camera.  most 'net cafes would let me connect the cf reader to upload
photos to my web site and to burn cd backups, but it's harder to find
one that'll let you install the camera s/w.

> > in /etc/modules.conf, i have:
> > 
> >     alias scsi_hostadapter usb-storage
> 
> Hmm. That's very interesting. I have the line
>      
> alias scsi_hostadapter ide-scsi

that's probably for your cd writer.  ah, yes, it is:

> to get my burner working using scsi emulation, but apart from that I have no
> clue about what it does.

when you try to access a scsi device, the kernel will load the
"scsi_hostadapter" module.  you can have something like this:

    alias scsi_hostadapter scsi_drivers
    probeall scsi_drivers aic7xxx usb-storage

to load multiple modules, but i have problems on this particular
machine with aic7xxx not unloading (there's only a rarely-used tape
drive on the bus).  probeall only seems to work if none of the modules
are loaded.  try it anyway, it might work for you.

there's a man page for modules.conf that'll tell you more than you
probably ever wanted to know about it ;-)

> >     cd /dev && ./MAKEDEV sd
> 
> That doesnt work under mdk. MAKEDEV doesnt exist on mdk, they use a
> different perk script called /sbin/makedev. I tried running it, and while it
> created /dev/sd the major number it chose to use bore no relationship to the
> major number everyone else is telling me the sd* device should be.

you can use mknod instead of MAKEDEV:

    cd /dev
    mknod sda b 8 0
    for i in $(seq 1 15); do mknod sda$i b 8 $i; done

sdb uses minor numbers 16-31, sdc uses 32-47, etc (the last is sdp).
    
> and I hope your arm heals quickly.

thanks, so do i.  the breaks (2) will heal soon enough, it's the
dislocated shoulder i'm worried about :-(


let me know if there's anything else i can do to help.


cheers,

john
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