Canon Powershot A60 on Debian

nicolas — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:02:52 +0000

Edit: This is a very old (2003) page of mine that needs a new location, and I think this blog is the best place.

I bought my camera at the end of april 2003 and after a few minutes of toying around i wanted to connect it to my favorite OS. I have been told that some of the stuff on this page will work with a powershot A70 or A75 too.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions or solutions to any problems. But I’m in no way an expert. Please notice that I haven’t changed this page for a very long time and probably won’t update it any more.

Debian sarge comes with gphoto 2.1.5, I tested 2.1.3.

Preparations

gphoto2 and hotplug

# apt-get install gphoto2 hotplug

Kernel

I’m not sure but i guess stock Debian kernels should have all the USB stuff compiled in, if you build your own kernel figure out what you need reading the fine gphoto2 manual.

Connect the cam

Connect the camera to your USB port and and turn it on in replay mode. Try

$ grep Canon /proc/bus/usb/devices

You will hopefully see something like

S:  Manufacturer=Canon Inc.
S:  Product=Canon Digital Camera

If not have a look at /var/log/messages. Does your kernel support USB?

Setting permissions

You don’t want to run gphoto2 as root, so follow the steps in /usr/share/doc/libgphoto2-2/README.Debian. If you don’t have a usb group yet create it (man addgroup) and remember to logout and login after adding yourself (man adduser) to the group. Change fstab and set the correct devgid there (man id).

I added the following line to my /etc/fstab:

none  /proc/bus/usb  usbfs devuid=0,devgid=1002,devmode=0660  0   0

First test

If hotplug found your camera try

$ gphoto2 --auto-detect

The output should be

Model                          Port
----------------------------------------------------------
Canon PowerShot A60            usb:

To download the first picture from your camera type

$ gphoto2 --get-file 1

You will need at least one file (photo, movie) on the cam of course.

Gphoto2 drivers

The camera can be accessed by two different kind of drivers:

The PTP protocol is a manufacturer-independent picture transfer protocol. Libgphoto2 doesn’t fully support PTP completeley yet.
There is also a project called jphoto that seems supports PTP but looks inactive, I haven’t tried it yet.
Canon protocol.

If you want to capture images with gphoto2 you need the ptp driver. This may work or not with the canon driver in the future.

Driver status

feature	ptp2 driver 2.1.3	canon driver 2.1.3
–capture-image	yes	no
–capture-movie	no	no
–delete-all-files	no (4)	yes
–delete-file range	no (4)	yes
–get-all-files	yes	yes
–get-all-thumbnails	yes	yes
–get-audio-data	?	?
–get-file range	yes	yes
–get-thumbnail range	yes	yes
–list-files	yes	yes
–list-folders	yes	yes
–mkdir folder	no	yes (1,3)
–num-files	yes	yes
–rmdir folder	?	?
–show-info range	yes	yes
–summary	yes	yes
–upload-file file	no	yes (2)

Comments:

the folder will be in capitals
the .deb in sid DOESN’T SUPPORT upload.
hm, can’t create a folder ‘folder’…
doesn’t delete everything properly (firmware bug?)

Note: Mixing the usage of both drivers seems to crash the camera.

More tools for the A60

libptp is part of gphoto but there is a stand-alone tool included that uses it to set camera properties.
You can’t do that with gphoto2.
Petr Danecek wrote a tool for for periodic capturing for the A70.
It should work with the A60 too (I didn’t test it yet).

Nicolas Kuttler » gphoto2