I had some Costco gift cards to use, and my digital camera’s been slowly dying for a year (even faster since getting soaked by the ocean in Hawaii). So I bought a new Canon SD500, a nice 7MP camera. I found a couple of docs saying it works in Linux. Problem is, I just can’t get it working.
First, it wasn’t even recognized as the user but was as root (found using `lsusb`), so I figured it was some sort of permissions problem. I came across a post from some guy named Steve suggesting that hotplug was the problem. After looking into it further, I found a file ‘/etc/hotplug/usb/usbcam’ that defines a group required to access hotplugged USB things. In Gentoo, this group is called “plugdev” — never heard of it in my life, never seen it in any documentation, nothing. You’d expect that it might be the “usb” group, but no, it’s something with a weird name nobody’s ever heard of.
Next, the camera was found in f-spot (added to portage today) and gthumb, but I still can’t get photos to import because other errors are coming up. The camera won’t respond to repeated identifier sequences, or it isn’t recognized, or something else.
If someone else has a Canon SD500 working properly in Linux, particularly Gentoo, please let me know.
Striving for greatness 