[plug] Canon PowerShot camera + Linux

[Denis Brown]

Dear Pluggers...

Canon PowerShot A200 camera connects happily to a GNU/Debian Woody system,
is seen as a USB device.  gtkam however does not list this particular
camera in its supported devices, neither does it appear in gphoto2
--list-cameras.   gphoto2 is version 2.1.something off the Knoppix distro
CD and I have not had a chance yet to update anything.

Grabbing gphoto2 sources onto another machine showed that the A200 was
absent from the Canon source files :-(   None the less it is reported as
being supported when reading the gphoto website!   Selecting the lsted
Canon cameras in gtkam one at a time gives identical results... cannot
initialise camera.

Canon tech support "do not support Linux" so no help from that quarter.
Before delving into to 0.4 release of gphoto (in case it was supported
back then and hasn't been ported to the 2.x series) I thought I'd ask
here, if anyone has had joy in getting one of these cameras to work.  It
might easily be something silly that I'm doing / not-doing that gives rise
to this problem :-)

At this time I do not have any other USB devices that I can use to check
the USB port or cabling but I suspect the hardware is okay because the
camera is shown correctly (identification string) in the list of connected
USB devices -- only one in this instance.   And it goes away / shows up
when camera power is cycled.

If there is something better / more camera-aware than gtkam, I'd be happy
to know.  All I want to do in the short term is grab some images from the
camera.   Loading Win98 or higher is not an option, needless to say!! 


Cheers and TIA,
Denis