Canon S40 and Linux

Note: If you are using a modern Linux distribution you should not have to do the above, USB will probably already be available in your Kernel.

Configuration Files:

The only configuration file you are probably going to need to edit at this poinf is /etc/fstab in order to ensure that the usbdevfs is mounted at boot time, make sure that /etc/fstab contains this line:

none /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs defaults 0 0

Installing the required Libraries:

You will need to have libusb installed on your computer, a development RPM and a base RPM are needed. Get libusb-0.1.4-1.i386.rpm and libusb-devel-0.1.4-1.i386.rpm. If you need to install from source code it can be found on Sourceforge.

Connecting the Canon Powershot S40 to the computer:

Use the supplied USB cable from any free USB port. When you have plugged the camera in type dmesg in an xterm, you should see a message something like this:

USB new device connect on bus1/1/3, assigned device number 7
USB device 7 (vend/prod 0x4a9/0x3056) is not claimed by any active driver.

Your S40 is now connected to your computer and can be accessed, well done. The hard part is coming up.

Software to download images and videos

Change: As of late Jan 2002, gphoto2 needs libexif, get this from sourceforge. You need the libexif and libexif-gtk packages. Get the most recent ones, unpack them and compile them before getting gphoto2.

To download images and videos the only program available at the moment is gphoto2. You may have heard of this program, or of gphoto. gphoto2 is a re-implementation of gphoto without a GUI. There is a catch though, S40 support is very new and only available from the gphoto2 CVS tree, so you will have to download it, here's how:

Make a directory called cvs, move into it.
Type the following commands to download the source code:
First you need to setup the cvs variables.
export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.gphoto.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gphoto
Then use CVS as normal like this:
cvs login
cvs -z3 checkout gphoto2
There is no password for the 'anonymous' user, just press enter when prompted for one.

You should now have a directory called gphoto2 containing the source code.

Now you need to configure, build and install the source code.

Run ./autogen.sh from within the gphoto directory.
Then run make to build the code.
Finally su -c 'make install' to install the code.

Downloading images and videos

The Powershot S40 is autodetected by gphoto2, to download images from the camera just type: gphoto2 -P you will probably have to be root to do this, in which case the command is su -c 'gphoto2 -P'.

Change: There is an application called gtkam included with the gphoto2 cvs though, and I suggest you use this as it provided a nice graphical interface. Go into the frontends/gtk-old/ directory in the gphoto2 directory and do a ./configure followed by a make and a

make
install

, you should now have the gtkam applicaiton at your disposal.

Change: You can disregard the superceeded stuff at the end of this chapter if you use usb-hotplugging. Read on if you are using a recent 2.4.x series kernel with hotplugging enabled.....

Get usb-hotplug from sourceforge. Make sure it is the latest version.
Extract, compile and install the code.
go to /etc/hotplug/ and put in the following files

Ensure that usb.usermap contains this line:

       
usbcam 0x0003 0x04a9 0x3056 0x0000 0x0000 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00000000

Put this file in /etc/hotplug/usb/usbcam

       
#!/bin/bash

        # $Id: gphoto2.txt,v 1.3 2001/10/19
14:13:38 hun Exp $

                                        

        if [ "${ACTION}" = "add" ] &&
[ -f "${DEVICE}" ]

        then

            chgrp camera "${DEVICE}"

            chmod a+rw "${DEVICE}"

        fi

Start hotplugging ( /etc/rc.d/init.d/hotplug start )
When you connect your camera users will have full read-write permissions. I've modified the script to start gtkam whenever I plug in the camera, but that's another story.
Run gtkam. You can select your camera and you're away.

Superceeded by usb-hotplugging!!!
The needing to be root thing is a real pain, so here is a workaround (security fans, look away in horror now)

Create a text file containing the following lines called getpics:

#!/bin/bash
gphoto2 -P
chmod 777 *

Make the script executable (chmod a+x getpics)
Become root.
Make the script suid root (i.e. chmod a+s getpics.sh)
Make /usr/local/bin/gphoto2 suid root (chmod a+s /usr/local/bin/gphoto2 )
Run the script in the directory in which you want your files to appear.

You can now download pictures from your PowerShot S40 (hopefully, if not, re-read this howto).

Viewing the pictures

You can use any image viewing program you want to view your pictures, I would suggest gqview for viewing and the Gimp for editing, i'm sure that you can find these yourself. Look on Freshmeat.

Viewing the videos

The S40 uses a quicktime codec to display it's videos. Usually this is Windows only, but there is a Linux program that works. It's called Mplayer. Get the source code to the latest release and install it. It includes windows-only .dlls that enable you to view your movies.

Conclusion:

So, that's it. Hopefully you can now download pictures from your S40 from Linux. I hope that this document has been of some use to you. If you can think of any imprevements please email me dan@dangray.org

Canon PowerShot s40 and Linux

Setting up the Linux Kernel: