[CentOS] Video on (video-capable digital) still camera not accessible

[Michael Kralka]

On Wed, 2009-05-20 at 11:16 -0700, MHR wrote:
<SNIP>
> Yesterday, I tried to download a video off of one of my digital still
> cameras that also takes videos (Canon Powershot SX10 iS) on my CentOS
> x86_64 5.3 system.  When I plugged the camera into a USB port and
> turned it on, it showed no images available, AND no device showed up
> mounted for it.  Now, this is not entirely unusual.
<SNIP>

This sounds oddly familiar. Have you reported a similar problem in the
past?

> I got a similar response when I plugged in the camera with the SD card
> in it and it shows up in lsusb:
<SNIP>
> I brought up the Win guest, attached the USB "drive" for the camera
> and Windows installed the device just fine.  I opened an Explorer
> window and the camera was there, with the photo and two .mov files in
> its folder, so I went in and clicked the photo and that was it.  The
> Windows guest crashed, and when it came back up, it booted so slowly I
> wasn't sure it was going to boot at all, and the network connections
> were gone.  I tried a number of things (restart Samba, reboot Windows
> in safe mode, then back to normal, restart Samba with Windows running,
> on and on).  Nothing worked.  All the TCP/IP settings were the same,
> and the network "card" showed one connection that was active, but no
> IP address, no path to host, pings all failed, etc.

So, if I understand this correctly, you have a CentOS host that is
having trouble accessing USB connected devices (your camera and SD cards
plugged into your USB card reader). However, a WinXP guest (running on
the CentOS host you are having trouble with) has no trouble accessing
these devices?

If so, it is unlikely you have a hardware problem...

> This morning, I figured that, since the guest network seemed to have
> been blown away completely, I'd reconfigure it and try again.
> 
> Voila!  All my drives are now sharing properly and the NAT network
> between host and guest works just fine.

Interesting.

> 1) CentOS not seeing either device (camera or SD-in-reader) as mountable

Just a guess. Could it be that VMware is "stealing" this device for
itself? I am fairly certain VMware can "steal" a device for a virtual
machine immediately after the USB device is plugged in.

If I were a betting man, I'd say VMware is interfering.

> 2) How to mount the SD card manually given that it does not appear to
> be a vfat (which is how most of these have shown up before IIRC).

I would be very surprised if it is not formatted as a VFAT partition;
Camera manufacturers have to make devices that use file systems that
will work on both Windows and MAC, leaving very limited options.

I guess the trick is, determining what device to use. You can always
look in dmesg to see what the kernel assigned, or if you are lazy like
me, look at the output of:
        ls /dev/sd?
before and after plugging in the device. The new device is the drive
and /dev/sd?1 will be the partition to mount.

> 3) VMWare losing its network configuration (or whatever it lost) that
> smashed its network connection to the host

Proprietary software. Knock on VMware's door. A colleague that is using
VMware Server (2.0) has been having no end of trouble with virtual
networking. I've been using KVM with great success (considering libvirt
using standard Linux components for networking -- bridges and taps --
instead of custom stuff).

> 4) (most important) Any ideas on how to get at the video files on the
> SD card (if I can mount it as the right kind of fs, that would be
> enough)

I think problem 1 is your real problem and the rest are just symptoms of
that (aside from 3, which may be related but is likely a VMware issue);
solve that and you are dancing!


HTH,
Michael
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