Re: tlug: Compact flash readers under Linux

["Thomas O'Dowd" <tom@example.com>]

On Sat, Jun 10, 2000 at 02:54:17PM +0900, Christopher Sekiya wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 10, 2000 at 01:58:38PM +0900, Jonathan Byrne wrote:
> 
> > (on a slight aside, those who've been dabbling in bleeding-edge
> > kernels, how good is the USB support?  If I get a USB camera,
> > should I expect it will probably work?).
> 
> How stable it will be for you, will depend heavily on the specific model of
> camera that you want to use.  Each has its own driver, with wildly varying
> code quality.

Hi Jonathan,

Funny you should send that email. I just spent the weekend with my new 850 Mhz,
loaded with USB support. I have the Canon Powershot S20 with 128MB memory. Up
to getting my new machine I'd been using gphoto to download the pics over serial
which was a tad painful to say the least. Do the calcs yourself. So naturally
I wanted to get USB working.

USB is apparently supported quite well for the canon although I have not been
able to get it to work yet. I downloaded, the 2.4.0-test1 kernel last night,
didn't bother about the patches, checked out experimental CVS tree of gphoto
and tried to get it all to compile. After about 2 hours of fiddling, still no
luck, as the dev branch was quite hard to compile. I think I'm pretty close
though and the gphoto maillist is quite responsive in terms of suggestions etc.
Hopefully, I'll have USB working tonight. I'll let you know.

Chris, have you any problems with the guy behind gphoto :-) It does have a 
commandline interface as well as a gui. When gphoto first came out it used to
crash a lot. Also depending on the camera you have, the driver might be buggier
then the others. The canon driver guys are probably the most active on the list.

As for the camera itself, I like the canon. It's small and fits in your pocket
(depending on your pockets) and I'm pretty satisfied with the quality. Night
time shots are a bit noisy, but I think this will be true of most of the 
cameras around the 70,000 yen range. The thing that is most important to me
about the camera is sufficient storage, hence the 128MB. The highres images
are about 2.7MB in size (2048x1536). I use the CF card but you can also use
the 340MB microdrive. Battery life is quite respectible too. Check it out.

I haven't tried to use any other USB devices.

Cheers,

Tom.
-- 
Thomas O'Dowd
tom@example.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Next Meeting (w/ YLUG): June 16 (Fri) 19:00 Mizonoguchi Marui Family 12F
Next Technical Meeting: July 8 (Sat)  13:30 Topic: TBA
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
more info: http://www.tlug.gr.jp        Sponsor: Global Online Japan