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:

1. 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.
2. 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

Comments:

1. the folder will be in capitals
2. the .deb in sid DOESN’T SUPPORT upload.
3. hm, can’t create a folder ‘folder’…
4. 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).

More links…

• I love hugin to stitch my photos!
• Have a look at this page about the A60

EXT4-fs (sda1): Filesystem with huge files cannot be mounted
read-write without CONFIG_LBDAF

But… I don’t have any huge files on that disk. Not bigger than some DVD iso anyway.

After a few days I finally get the time to check the kernel configuration docs, and they say:

CONFIG_LBDAF:
 
Enable block devices or files of size 2TB and larger.
 
This option is required to support the full capacity of large
(2TB+) block devices, including RAID, disk, Network Block
Device, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and loopback.
 
This option also enables support for single files larger than
2TB.
 
The ext4 filesystem requires that this feature be enabled in
order to support filesystems that have the huge_file feature
enabled.  Otherwise, it will refuse to mount in the read-write
mode any filesystems that use the huge_file feature, which is
enabled by default by mke2fs.ext4.
 
The GFS2 filesystem also requires this feature.
 
If unsure, say Y.

Well, alright. mkfs.ext4 has said feature enabled by default. That’s what you get for building your own kernels and not reading everything in make oldconfig.

Edit: The feature can be activated at Enable the block layer ---> Support for large (2TB+) block devices and files, thanks to Arix.

Edit:: The feature can be removed from an existing filesystem by running the following commands:
tune2fs -O ^huge_file /dev/whatever
fsck /dev/whatever
This should allow you to mount the drive without CONFIG_LBDAF in the kernel. Thanks Marcus!

The NIC

Make sure there’s a Linux driver for your network interface card. Make sure the card can be run in master mode.

DHCP

The boxes that will connect need an IP. Install dhcp3-server and do something like this in /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:

[...]
option domain-name "192.168.6.0";
option domain-name-servers 192.168.6.1;
[...]
subnet 192.168.6.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  range 192.168.6.10 192.168.6.15;
  option routers 192.168.6.1;
}
[...]

Configure the network

Configure the interface so that it can be started with ifup. Usually you want the connected boxes to have access to whatever internet connection the access point has, so I enable forwarding and masquerading in /etc/network/interfaces:

iface eth1 inet static
    address 192.168.6.1
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    network 192.168.6.0
    wireless-mode master
    wireless-essid debianftw
    wireless-key1 s:12345
    post-up /bin/echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
    post-up /sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE
    post-up /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server restart

13245 is the WEP password and the network will be called debianftw.

Optional: DNS

You may want to have name servers for the connected boxes. A quick solution is to take those from your /etc/resolv.conf and to put them in your /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf. There are other solutions, like a caching only DNS server.

Security

WEP isn’t a very good encryption but it’s enough for me. You probably don’t want to run this setup for a long time, it’s really just some notes to get me started quickly. Maybe I’ll add more about security in an update.