HOWTO: Canon PowerShot A70 and Linux

Canon A70 with Linux

To cut to the end - yes, I can get the Canon digicam to work with Linux.

Are we in trouble?

The camera does not seem to support that I directly mount the CompactFlash drive under Linux over USB :-(

It also seems that the libgphoto2 does not yet (2003-05-01) know the A70 camera

The good news is that the camera is using the PTP standard, which means that we can connect the device without major problems.

Mandrake 9.1 with these packages installed
- gphoto2-2.1.1-2mdk
- libgphoto2-2.1.1-2mdk
- gphoto-0.4.3-17mdk
I also use Nautilus (nautilus-2.2.1-5mdk) to browse my pictures when they are in the PC
flphoto can access the device (flphoto-1.1-0.4mdk) (Gnome program)
To get my pictures I can also use the KDE frontend program digicam http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=digikam, i.e. ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrake-devel/contrib/i586/digikam-0.5.1-5mdk.i586.rpm.

I stated by editing the file /etc/hotplug/usb.usermap.

Locate the line with "Canon PowerShot S40" (line 79) - copy and paste the two lines. Edit the two copied lines

Now I can do gphoto2 --auto-detect -L to see a list of pictures, and gphoto2 --auto-detect -P to get all pictures copied.

Question: Is this step needed?

It seems that it is far more stable to do gphoto2 --usbid 0x4a9:0x3073=0x4a9:0x3056 --camera "Canon PowerShot S40" -P

Well - easy does it... The program will automagically detect the camera as USB PTP camera

Here is how I set up the digikam program (click on the thumpnails).