On Fri, Jul 06, 2001 at 11:27:33AM -0400, Michael B. Taylor wrote: > I stayed away from usb at the time I bought my camera because I did not > consider usb support in Linux to be stable/mature enough. If I were > buying a camera today, however, I would look seriously at trying to put > together a gphoto + usb solution under kernel 2.4.x. Firewire, if it > could be made to work for this, would be even cooler.
Compiling USB support was straightforward for both my desktop and laptop (an old Toshiba Tecra 550CDT -- I was worried that its USB would be too old). I used the Debian 2.4.5 package and kernel-package, of course. My Canon with gphoto2 transfers 1600x1200 fine (less jpeg compression) pictures at about 3 seconds per picture in a single operation. I cannot imagine using floppy disks or a serial port. USB seems fast enough. The extra expense of firewire doesn't seem justified for still pictures. And, by the way, while Windows ME has built-in automatic support for my camera, gqview is a far superior way to sort through pictures quickly than anything I have in Windows (although I admit to not doing an exhaustive search, since I don't really care). The bad news is that I have an Epson Photo Stylus 870 that prints on 4 inch roll paper but is not yet supported in Linux. The good news is that I mixed some digital camera/Epson 870 prints in with some 45 millimeter prints from Kodak and none of my friends could figure out which were which. -- Michael Epting ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
