Digital Camera on Slackware

September 23, 2007

I like my digicam quite a lot; its a Canon Powershot A630. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles possible, but it’s a nice little piece that takes decent photos. I’m also a distro hopper, and as such reinstall my operating system every once in a while to try something new. I find I keep going back to Slackware. It’s what I cut my teeth on, and it’s what I know best.  Alas, Slackware doesn’t interface with my digicam without additional software.

The Powershot is one of many cameras that don’t appear as a USB Mass Storage device to the computer. This complicates things because you need a separate piece of software to communicate and download the photos. Luckily, it does use a rather standard protocol called PTP which is easily accessible using gphoto2.

If your distro doesn’t support PTP cameras out of the box, you’ll want to install this package. Necessary items (on Slackware, anyway) are libgphoto2 and gphoto2 itself. Both are available on gphoto2′s Sourceforge download page, linked from the main site.

Once compiled and installed (standard method of ./configure && make && su -c ‘make install’), you can detect the camera by issuing the following command.

mshade@gobot:~$ sudo gphoto2 --auto-detect
Model Port
----------------------------------------------------------
Canon PowerShot A630 (PTP mode) usb:

There you have it! The device is detected automagically by gphoto2. To download all pictures from the camera to the current directory, issue this command:

mshade@gobot:~/pics$ gphoto2 -P


Voila. Digicams on Slackware made easy.

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