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the Apple iPod is the same, as you have to use iTunes to copy music to it,

Huh? There's gtkpod, and a few others for Linux support.

Back to the original topic, there is gPhoto, which handles numerous digital camera transfer protocols other than the mountable file system paradigm. This includes quite a few Kodak models.

It's doable with gphoto

libptp
for canons : http://capture.sourceforge.net/
others http://www.gphoto.org/doc/remote/

Scanners
http://www.sane-project.org/sane-supported-devices.html

wireless NICs
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Devices/USB

digital cameras
http://www.gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php Note that any camera that works as a USB storage device (most these days) will work also.

3D video cards
AFAIK, there are no sites anymore, but all current cards along with any card AGP, PCI, or PCI Express card made within the last 5-8 years or so that have ATI or NVIDIA chipsets will certainly work on any x86 Linux PC with the appropriate slot available. The support for many on-board video cards that are not NVIDIA or ATI, such as the popular VIA Chrome9 and Unichrome chipsets is available, but the support for it is sketchy at best unless you're willing dive into CVS or SVN repositories and grab in-development drivers. Even then, last I checked (about 6 months ago), these drivers were unstable as hell.

other hardware
check the forums on http://linuxhardware.org.

This list is hardly complete. In the next week or so, look for me to compile a more complete resource guide and post it at http://rob.shinn.googlepages.com/ . I'm doing it because I get tired of answering questions like "Where do I go to find out what [printers|scanners|alien mothership interfaces|...] work on Linux?"

Maybe one day I'll see a camera with a bog standard USB connector that doesn't need a specific driver

Try plugging a Canon S3 into a computer that never had any Canon hardware on it. Perhaps your ass is so slack from pulling such stupidities out of it so often.

Ahh. So you have *ONE* camera that's broken, so therefore *ALL* cameras are broken the same way? All you need to do to "see a camera with a bog standard USB connector that doesn't need a specific driver" is to open your eyes.

Sounds like you're the one who's "pulling stupidities".

You need the correct USB cable because the camera tries to act as a host (so it can drive a printer). Thing is, all these cables look exactly the same.

The cables look exactly the same because they *ARE* exactly the same, shithead. Even cameras that can do PictBridge (ie. ones that "can drive a printer") use the exact same cables as any other.

You need to install Canon's sheisse to access the camera.

Sorry, but are you honestly claiming that Canon wrote gphoto? Because I'm pretty sure they didn't have anything to do with it.

Honestly, does it hurt to be that stupid?

try gphoto2 if you can not mount them as a mass storage device...

http://www.gphoto.org/

if your talking about a digital camera? (not a webcam?)

i can understand the troll status of your comment as digital cameras are off topic, but digital cameras are not an issue for Linux as they all work fine in Linux, almost all of them are just FAT32 storage devices as far as Linux is concerned, unless you compiled your own kernel and did not add support for FAT32 or missed something else like USB support, but i am just giving you the shadow of a doubt just incase you are not being a troll and really need help with your digital camera...

libgphoto is an OSS library for interfacing with digital cameras. Marcus Meissner is a major Wine developer. Presumably, he wrote a patch that integrates libgphoto with Wine, thus enabling Picassa to download photos from digital cameras - a neccessary feature that would not have otherwise been available as part of the Wine API.

Also I love linux, but my Olympus c3030 won't work with it.

It's on the list of gphoto2 supported cameras.

Hark! I hear the sound of somebody who hasn't use Linux in years.

Support for most printers is there out of the box. Both my HP Laser and my Epson Printer/Scanner were supported out of the box on the current and previous versions of Ubuntu. That's printing *and* scanning.

Again, on the latest version of Ubuntu, there's an option in the main menu, under Graphics, called gtkam which you might notice because it has a little picture of a digital camera next to it. Click it and you can interface with most digital cameras. No driver installation necessary. Alternatively, just plug your memory card into your card reader and an icon for the card will appear on your desktop. I'm having a hard time imagining how they could make it any simpler.

Several of the Linux audio players have in-built support for the iPod. The default media player for Kubuntu, amaroK, does, as does the default media player for Ubuntu, Rhythmbox.

OK, this one is supported but you're going to have to install an application to deal with it. Luckily, Ubuntu comes with a graphical utility to install programmes. All you have to do is tell it to install Kino and you're sorted.

So please, when you're going to diss Linux, at least have the decency to try it first.

The Nikon WiFi support with the D2X does support standards, FTP and PTP/IP, which are both published and supported by Linux.

The ptp/ip protocol:
https://www.fotonation.com/
Linux support for digital cameras and PTP/IP in particular:
http://www.gphoto.org/
Raw image processing, including encrypted Nikon D2X images:
http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp? cid=7-6459-7213
http://www.photoreview.com.au/Articlexasp/90c83053 -0a7f-45cc-ba68-9560e9f3c061/Default.htm
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/336/C3218/
http://dailywireless.org/modules.php?name=News&fil e=article&sid=3061
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml;jsessionid=E0TTJLUSVT5NSQSNDBGCKHSCJUMEKJVN?art icleID=47204433&_requestid=171509

I just add a bit on that list from top of my head.
Although I think the listed app goes beyond what the so called 'average pc user' wants, but there goes...

1. Konqueror ( http://www.konqueror.org/ )

2. Email - Sylpheed ( http://sylpheed.good-day.net/ )

3. I think Evolution is more like in this place.

4. Lately "Sound Juicer" is taking more attention too

5. VideoLAN aka VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/ ) and Ogle ( http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/ ) [and Goggles ( http://www.fifthplanet.net/goggles.html ) for Ogle GUI wrapper] for DVD watching.

6. There are plenty way to do this, but the typical ones could be 'Jinzora' ( http://www.jinzora.org/ ) and 'MusicPD' ( http://www.mpd.org/ ), even plain Apache does it fine too, in a way.

8. If you want easier to manage iptables wrapper, Shorewall ( http://www.shorewall.net/ ) and there are other wrappers too.

9. KOffice ( http://www.koffice.org/ ) and by individual components, Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ), Gnumeric ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ ), Gnucash ( http://www.gnucash.org/ )

10. Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) or Sodipodi ( http://www.sodipodi.com/ ) for vector graphics.

11. Miranda ( http://miranda-im.org/ ). Windows only.

13. Hmm , Samba? ( http://www.samba.org/ ), WedDAV (Look parent post), FTP (plenty ftp daemons, ex : http://www.proftpd.org/, http://vsftpd.beasts.org/ etc)

16. GPhoto ( http://www.gphoto.org/ ), EOG ( http://www.gnome.org/ ? ), GQView ( http://gqview.sourceforge.net/ ). The latters are for just viewing mainly.

20. FreeNX ( http://www.nomachine.com/ , http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) http://www.poptop.org/ ), L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tpd ), RP-L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/ )

24. Postfix ( http://www.postfix.org/ ), Sendmail ( http://www.sendmail.org/ ), Exim ( http://www.exim.org/ ), Cyrus ( http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/ ), Xmail ( http://www.xmailserver.org/ ), qmail ( http://www.qmail.org/ )

25. Spamassassin ( http://spamassassin.apache.org/ )

26. Same as above.

27. XSane ( http://www.xsane.org/ ) for sane frontends.

30. Buzzmachines ( http://www.buzzmachines.com/ ) I could be wrong...

31. 'various GUI frontends' - X CD Roast ( http://www.xcdroast.org/ ), K3B ( http://k3b.sourceforge.net/ )

32. Don't know any opensource ones...

gphoto http://www.gphoto.org/
it's for getting and organizing photos from your camera. I use an older ver. not gphoto2 because I have an older camera that has better support with gphoto than with gphoto2.

I use FireFox and Thunderbird on the Mac and when using Linux ... Aww never... mind when you said "If Firefox isn't what you need, then I guess that pretty much leaves MSIE. Maybe you should have bought a Dell and used MSIE + Outlook 2003." it points out that you just don't get it now do you.

have a nice iLife in your little i-Bubble

you could try gphoto2

http://www.gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php

first i got the sourcecode libgphoto2, gphoto2 and gtkam, and then i read the list of digital cameras they supported, and then i printed the list of supported cameras, and i would only buy one from that list that fit my budget...

as a long time Linux user i know some hardware is not supported by Linux so i always research before shopping...

Making fluxbox and its kin usable winds up requiring I run half a dozen other apps. Xfce is those apps, bundled together. You can think of it as Gnome done right.

Incredible! Does this mean a base installation of XFce includes Firefox, Abiword, Emacs, GVim, The Gimp, GPhoto, Inkscape and Scribus? These are the apps I require in order to make Fluxbox usable.

My Canon A40 works just fine in Linux, using Digikam (via gphoto2). A large number of Canon and Minota cameras are supported under Linux. Also, many Canon and Minolta printers are supported.

I agree about a native PSP for Linux - that would rock - but have you tried it with Wine?

Most digital cameras these days support both of these protocols;

1. USB mass storage
2. Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP)

The Kodak is probably one of them. If it is using another mode, or if one of them does not work well enough (typically PTP), switching to the other mode will fix the problem. This is a camera setting, not an OS setting.

This means; no special software for each specific camera. All PTP camera-aware tools work the same. All mass storage cameras work just like flash storage drives.

In addition, most distributions support linking known USB cameras to the /camera or /mnt/camera mount point automatically; plug it in and a camera shows up.

one person recomended gPhoto he is absoluteely correct, it is a wonderful product, and the gtk2 interface, gtkam is extremely simple to use.

one person recomended gPhoto he is absoluteely correct, it is a wonderful product, and the gtk2 interface, gtkam is extremely simple to use.

Try: gphoto.

Can this run my digital camera? Can I run the Sims on this?

And the answers for Linux would be: Probably, and Yes.

Have you tried gphoto for all you digital camera access needs?

I'm not sure exactly what the point of these is...we've already got very nice apps that do the same thing as these (and have nicer interfaces): for music, either Rhythmbox or Muine, and for photos, GPhoto. The only purpose I can see for LinSpire to have its own photo and music apps is branding, which is pretty silly since they're already positioning themselves as the OS for "generic" PCs. I'm afraid I just don't see the point.

For me, gtkam worked out of the box.

I'm just curious to know as a digital camera photographer. For instance, I often use a Samsung 800k camera and on Linux the only support is via an obscure little tool you may have heard off, gphoto which is a bit clunky to set up. How is camera support on FreeBSD? I've considered switching.

It's slightly more complicated than that...

The Easyshare cameras ( I know this cuz I have a CX4230 ) use PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol) which is a standard supported by Kodak, Sony, Canon and others to offer standard way for talking to the cameras. This makes it trivial to support new cameras when the come out since you don't have to go thru the trouble of building a driver from scratch.

There's a sourceforge page with more details

But the short of the answer is that it should work fine. Check out the compatiblity list to be sure, but gphoto also offers a generic driver which should work as a generic driver.

Does it support Kodak Easyshare cameras?

The Kodak Easyshare cameras I've seen are USB mass storage devices--you don't really need Kodak's proprietary software in order to get a copy of the pictures from the camera on to your computer. This is probably why you could "surf the cameras [sic] memory in Explorer" and why you will probably be able to do the same thing in any other OS that supports USB mass storage devices. On top of that, gPhoto supports many cameras including the Kodak Easyshare DX4900 and the gPhoto front-ends work flawlessly with the DX4900. I'm guessing it probably supports your Kodak camera too. gPhoto is Free Software.

As far as just plugging in the camera and having it work, isn't that what gPhoto and it's GTK2 frontend gtkam are for. It seems to me that those would work just fine for many cameras. And if you have a camera that uses USB Mass storage, it's even easier because automounter should work just fine for you.

There are a good number of things that aren't perfectly userfriendly on a GNU/Linux system, but i don't think this is one of them.

As far as just plugging in the camera and having it work, isn't that what gPhoto and it's GTK2 frontend gtkam are for. It seems to me that those would work just fine for many cameras. And if you have a camera that uses USB Mass storage, it's even easier because automounter should work just fine for you.

There are a good number of things that aren't perfectly userfriendly on a GNU/Linux system, but i don't think this is one of them.

When was the last time you looked at a Linux System? Even so-called "diehard" Distros like Debian or Slackware can handle such a task quite fine. If you use a cam that can be mounted as a USB-Drive youre all set. Plugin, mount (under Gnome using Rightclick on the Desktop).
If not get one of these and get gphotolib. It couldnt be any easier.

cu,
Lispy

Some type of software? Don't be so pessimistic, device drivers aren't the only things we know how to write. If the manufacturers don't help, we'll reverse-engineer it and do it anyway.

My Kodak DC-5000 works without any additions on my Mac...let's not get into the fact that Linux doesn't suppor them at all
At least the DC-5000 works fine in Linux.

I currently own a Kodak DC3200 - cheapest looking piece of shit camera that was ever made (ok, next to the Photorun DJ1000 - which I also own). The DC3200 cost me about $150.00 a few months ago (and just noticed on PriceWatch it is much cheaper now). It has all the features I want, and despite looking like shit, actually gives great pictures:

* "megapixel" quality (1280 x 960 or thereabouts, I believe, on highest setting)
* 2x digital zoom - which sucks because it only works on the 640 x 480 setting
* LCD preview display
* Serial interface and video out
* Flash
* Built in 2 meg memory
* Uses CompactFlash memory cards, as well
* Linux "compatible" via gPhoto

It really does have great quality, even in low light levels - I picked it specifically because it stored the images in jpeg format on the card, guaranteeing me that I could use an operating system of my choice. A serial interface that guarantees no proprietary lock in. Wow! All of that cheap! My complaints:

Lens cap and charger for the batteries not included - they are seperate items to buy. Plus, there is a small lag time when taking a picture, about a second (that, and the "speed" of the camera is very low - no capturing high speed shots - but I am not a professional photographer, so I don't care much).

All in all, not many complaints - and far more worth it than a disposable digital (which, I have to admit, have hack value attractiveness for me). I think maybe having one of these as a backup or standby for bad situations (where you wouldn't want to lose a good camera) is also an idea.

To be honest, I have wondered for a while when these kind of things would come out - I am now waiting for "disposable" video cameras...

I'm the unfortunate owner of one of their low-end "Fun! Flash 640SE" cameras.

My complaint with it has nothing to do with the low quality of the images (which look as though they are merely "interpolated" to 640x480 rather than actually BEING 640x480 as advertised) nor the cheap construction - I rather expected both for a ~$80 digital camera.

My complaint is their horrendous support for it. In my specific case, I'd emailed to them asking about protocol specs so that the gPhoto project might be able to put together a working driver. Now, the fact that they would give no useful information is, sadly, not all that unusual, but the form of the response was rather unimpressive. Over a month after sending the email, I got back a medium-sized email in reply. ALL BUT ONE LINE of that email was form-letter "thank you for contacting polaroid blah blah blah". The very first line was the only unique one. It said "that information is not available."

Given that Xirlink actually made the camera core, and there APPEARS to be some sort of business-stifling "Intellectual Property" agreement between Polaroid's digital division and that "ArcSoft" company that makes the obnoxious 'pretty bird' program (I forget the name of the windows 9x-only software - its mascot is a clown-colored bird...) that is supposed to keep it such that only the Polaroid/ArcSoft drivers are able to get to the camera, so I wrote back asking if they meant that they didn't HAVE the information (i.e. that I should contact Xirlink or ArcSoft instead) or that they were not allowed to release it. Over a week later, another one-terse-line-plus-formletter-crap response - "We do not make that information available." (which is not only somewhat rude but as before doesn't even answer the question.)

It was then that I figured they were screwed...if they had no interest in AT LEAST being polite to potential new markets, let alone actually encouraging their development, it seemed pretty obvious that other digital camera companies would roll over them, and, as others have already pointed out in this vein, considering how expensive and low quality their other "instant photograph" products were, that digital cameras would slowly devour that market as they got cheaper, and polaroid would have nothing to fall back on. Nice going, Polaroid.

(On the plus side, last I heard there was some progress in getting recognizeable images from the Polaroid "Fun!" cameras, so maybe I'll be able to actually use mine eventually...More info about the cameras here and, more currently, here.)

Patents are granted monopolies in exchange for full declaration the invention.

Those holding patents often realise that there is more money to be made licensing the patent to other companies as this tends to make their technocology wider used and a small peice of a huge pie is better than all of a tiny one. This is why Dolby are so successful, for a fee and a balanced royalty anyone can play with their stuff and thus, many do.

There is No Legal Reason why any company holding software patents cannot license them to anyone they like for or without a fee and for this precise reason Bruce Perens et al are trying to get IBM and HP to set a 'social precident' for software companies to not sue free software developers for patent infringement.

IPIX are doing themselves no favours here, if they had the foresight their monotonous press releases suggest ("IPIX, the world leader in..." play another record!), they'd allow free software folk to improve their ideas (they still own the patent underneigth and can make a killing licensing the whole shebang to camera producers).

If you have more to gain by co-operating, and less to lose by calming the legal dept down, do it! Otherwise you'll just find many of those you most want to embrace IPIX stuff won't touch it with a barge pole. They already seem to prefer the other method of stitching images together to get panoramas.

Cluetrain anyone?

GPhoto - Free Digital Camera Software

Power management works, my Logitech USB Optical Wheel Mouse works, my digital camera works using Gphoto. Oh, did I mention that it has never crashed? Did I mention that when I wiped the default windoze installation off the drive tat it went from a 1.1 GB base install to a 700 MB install, and that's including 300 MB of swap space?

In fact, although I'm pretty sure that most people think of the BSDs as server operating systems, (particularly OpenBSD), I'm just giddy over here. Yes, it was a lot of work, and sure, Linux would have probably worked pretty well, but I like the svelt, clean BSD design, and the BSDs are what I'm most comfortable with.

This article is actually pretty timely, since I am going to be puting FreeBSD on my dual processor desktop machine next week (never played with it much before), and I'm sure I'll pick up a few pointers and get to read a couple "*BSD is dying*" trolls along the way.

KDE comes with so many other good programs as well, like KNode (News reader) and KMail (lightweight email program)... Does GNOME have any comparable programs?

Errr... yes! Pan is probably the best free newsreader for any platform, Evolution is an incredibly well-integrated mail, calender and addressbook program, and Balsa is a very decent more lightweight mail reader. For office programs, Gnumeric is way more advanced than KSpread, Guppi (still in CVS) is one of the only serious free graphical data analysis tools, GnuCash is very polished, and Dia rocks. Graphically, Sodipodi is shaping up very nicely, gPhoto rules, and the GIMP integrates better with a GNOME environment than with KDE. And then there's XMMS (the best mp3/ogg/mpeg/divx Linux player), Grip (the best CD player/ripper combo) and GStreamer for multemedia; there's GnomeICU, Gabber, Gaim and X-Chat for messaging; there's Gnapster for file-sharing; and there's more useful utilities (e.g. Bug Buddy), system utilities (e.g. Red Carpet), and panel applets than you could shake a stick at. And I know I've missed out quite a few more (Gnome-DB, Oregano and Dr. Genius have just spring to mind - and, yes, Galeon, which rocks and is now my primary browser). In other words, GNOME is hardly short on applications.

If anything, I've often found it to be the other way round. While Konqueror rules, and KWord is much better featured than AbiWord (though I personally dislike the interface), I think where KDE usually excels is in the underlying desktop core, rather than the applications. But that's just my opinion.

PS Sorry for ranting.

Thanks, you're quite right that the proper URL is www.gphoto.org, not www.gphoto.com. Unfortunately, your post had a malformed link so you you can't see it there either. Third time's a charm ... ;-)

Thanks, RJS

sorry, it's www.gphoto.org
-mdek.net

BTW, the correct URL is not "www.gphoto.com", but

-mdek.net

I can sympathize with what you are trying to do, as I've tried both uses with my Nikon Coolpix 950. The short answer is both are possible, but it isn't likely to be easy to get what you want out of the setup. Once drivers are available, you should be able to use your digital camera as a webcam fairly effectively, though you may have issues with autofocus, flash, and other camera-only adjustments. For astrophotography, it isn't likely you'll be able to get worthwhile images with the Elph, but I've included a few links on how to get started.

Digial Camera Webcams

Digital cameras defintely produce a much more compelling image than a typical webcam. I have a 3Com HomeConnect (a pretty good quality webcam) and it looks just awful compared to my Nikon N950 (not just resolution, but also trueness of color, CCD noise, and sensitivity). The main limitations are that you can't usually take mini-movies or fast sequences, some key functions are often only controllable on camera (for instance auto-focus and flash), and you'll need a power cord for the camera if you don't want to drain the batteries very quickly.

The easiest way to control the camera from a linux box is with Scott Fritzinger's GPL'd gphoto program. gphoto allows basic control of a variety of cameras through serial or USB connection (and supports both interactive and commmand line modes - add a bit of perl and cron and you can do all sorts of fun things). Its still under development, however, and unfortunately doesn't currently support the Digital Elph (PowerShot S100) to my knowledge. I'm not sure how involved it would be to write a USB Elph driver for it, but you can check out the site if you feel up to it.

Digital Cameras and CCD Astrophotography

With astrophotography, you are getting into a rather specialized and involved use of CCD devices and generally speaking, it takes a good bit of expertise and dollars to get good results. You don't mention what you are looking to capture or what existing equipment you have, so I'll point out some of the basics and you can research further from these. FWIW, I'm not by any means an expert here, but I've been looking to jump in, so I'm seeing the same issues.

While there are limited exceptions, CCD astrophotography generally requires the use of specialized equipment. Your Canon Digital Elph doesn't have the required sensitivity (its equivalent to ISO 100 film), ability to take long exposures, long and fast enough lenses, or adapters for telescope mounting. While its possible to use a barn door tracker or equitorial tracking camera mount with the Elph, the results aren't likely to be worth the effort.

If you really get interested in astrophotography, you'll probably want to pony up for a specialized system like those built by Celestron and SBIG. These are highly sensitive, small array CCD cameras with specialized cooling and software for high gain operation. Add a high quality telescope, equitorial tracking mount, and related accessories, and you are talking about no small dollar commitment. Also, you'll need a lot of time and patience to find and capture accurately really good photos. I'd like to try CCD astrophotography out, but will be playing with 35mm (add a T mount and a Meade ETX and you can get started for under $1000) until I decide I'm really committed and move to a less light polluted neighborhood.

Sky & Telescope has a pretty good guide on where to start. Some good introductions to astrophotgraphy are:

• Sky and Telescope Imaging Resources
• Amateur Astrophotography links
• CCD Astrophotgraphy (annoying sounds)
• Santa Barbara Imaging Group (SBIG), a leading astro CCD maker
• Pin's Astronomy Page

Have fun, RJS

Luckily, the konica protocol, which has been published by konica, is very similar, so it had been relatively easy to reverse engineer the protocol for gphoto.

I can only advise you to buy digital cameras from Nikon, Minolta, Konica, or any company that provides the specs so that you can actually use your camera.

So far for HP and open source...

I just had to say this.

Lutz

Most cameras come with a serial port for transfers as well as their storage media, whatever kind they use. In fact, at the very low end, there's often *only* a serial port. (Try the digicam area at your local Walmart to check out the most abused cameras you're likely to find in the First World; strange inventory from quite nice to ugly outdated pieces of junk.)

Quite a few cameras do come with a USB port; Kodak makes some models that do, for instance, and one of my new lust-objects (The Fuji FinePix 4700 aka Leica Digilux Zoom) does as well.

I'm unsure about what level of support these USB-port cameras have under Linux, though it appears from recent traffic on the gPhoto mailing list that there is support in the works for image transfer over USB, with the goal of user transparency as to whether the camera is connected via serial, USB or some other means.

timothy

I've done alot of amature work with 35mm and medium format, and I liked the specs on this camera. Rotating Zeiss lens, 2x zoom 2.1 MP, ability to store MPEG movies, effects (black & white, sepitome, solarize, and negative).

When I got the camera home, I immediately filled up a 64 meg flash card. Held something like 120+ images at 1600x1200.

Then came the process of getting the pictures to the system. The only option is serial, and if you are in windows, a proprietary software. No drivers for making it a TWAIN source either. Sony's support system is like that apparently.

In linux, conveniently, there was Gphoto, and it was handy, but took about 8-10 hours to download 50 pictures. That was unacceptable.

To end the story, I like the camera, but if I want to take some pictures with it, I have to set aside a weekend to download them.

is that it should support your platform. Most cameras don't support one or more of the following: BeOS, Mac OS Classic, Mac OS 10, FreeBSD, NetBSD, GNU/Linux, and Solaris. If you're on a Unix-like system, check the gPhoto compatibility list before you buy.

---

I've got a Kodak DC240 Digital Camera and USB transfers work excellently with the dev kernels I've tried (2.3.29 & 2.3.40) (I don't have any other USB devices). Get gPhoto with its support for 90+ models, and you're laughing. Hava a look at linux-usb.org for the status of support for various devices.

• Lots of money has and is going to be made in the Linux market
• That people and corporations are making money on the backs of the good people who have produced code for free under the GPL (in many cases)
• The capitalization of Linux will be and has been very good for it

I struggled with this one personally recently, so I've spent some time thinking about it. I wanted to carry a line of digital cameras on my Linux electronic commerce site and realized that the only reason I was able to sell them at all to the Linux market was that some nice people had created GPLed software for them.

So what to do? If I rolled some kind of dontation into the price of the software, and then kicked that back to gPhoto, I'd lose business as my prices would be higher and people would go elsewhere. I could just make a single donation to the group but without knowing how many cameras I would sell as a result of their software, putting a price on that donation was almost impossible. Plus doing that would still up the price of the cameras unless I ate it somewhere else.

So I started the Canux OSS Support Program. Customers who are in the process of purchasing an Epson digital camera can simply click on a link and add the "donation" item to their shopping basket! This does three important things:

• The camera owner ends up supporting the group that provided the software in the first place - and feels good about doing so
• I eat the merchant transaction costs and do the sales part of the job - and feel that I'm contributing
• The OSS team (gPhoto) gets funding, can buy equipment, and in turn produces even better software.

I understand that this kind of thing only works for certain types of OSS, and that many of the larger projects have already found innovative ways of getting funding. Still, I have to wonder if people were given some kind of convenient way of supporting the OSS groups they cared about, would they??

I think they would, but I'm an optimist. I'll keep you posted...

I reposted some of the photos at http://gphoto.org/fsf-award99/

I've been using the GIMP since about 0.54 and I couldn't live without it. I scan a lot of images for a family history project, and I take lots of photos with my digital camera. I use the GIMP for all sorts of color adjustment, cropping, touch-up, and special effects in my photos, as well as creating the graphics for my web site.

Although I'm not a professional photographer or the like, I still want to organize and manage my images in a professional manner. In my job as a programmer, I use RCS and directory hierarchies to organize and care for my code -- why shouldn't I treat my images with as much care?

I have needs that GIMP doesn't meet by itself. For example, I want to organize my images. Not just into folders, but according to varying criteria, such as date taken, subject, exhibit (whether an image has been used in a web site or document), etc.

Also, I want to track different versions of my images. I typically keep several versions: the raw scan, the first touch-up (after scratch removal, color correction, and other tweaks), a cropped version (because I might crop differently for different uses), and several scalings: the full original, a 640x480 web-site size, and a thumbnail. I want a tool that helps me manage all these versions, track where they've been used, and jump among them (or call them up in GIMP).

Organizing images is an area that's coming along nicely, with the development of gPhoto and Photodex, but these tools only address that one area of concern. And to be truly useful, they need to be well-integrated with the GIMP, so that one can edit an image with a double-click.

I have heard that Photodex will eventually have integration with the GIMP, but that appears to be some way away. Photodex also has the problem that it isn't open source, and probably won't ever be.

GPhoto shows great promise, but it appears to have some overlaps with the GIMP. For example, it has its own color correction dialog. I'd prefer to see gPhoto integrated with the GIMP for image editing, rather than trying to provide its own. GPhoto has great digital camera support so far, its greatest strength. Good digicam management is another need for a complete image management tool suite.

What about version control? No one out there seems to be thinking at all about this. Maybe because it's a wacko idea -- but I for one would find it useful.

Version control of images needn't be difficult. Of course, you couldn't do it the same way RCS does it, with content diffs. Storage requirements would get way out of hand; just saving the individual versions would require less.

A better idea, one that could be accomplished with the help of the GIMP, would be to record all the mousing, keystrokes, and dialog interaction that goes into the editing of an image; these are the "diffs". This data could be stored far more compactly than storing all the image versions. You could play back the edits on the original raw scan to produce any intermediate or final version. If it takes too long to play back from the original, you could store full binary versions of significant intermediate versions.

None of this is intended to slam the GIMP, Photodex or gPhoto. Just some ramblings on where I'd like to see image management go in the open-source world.

--JT

I've been using the GIMP since about 0.54 and I couldn't live without it. I scan a lot of images for a family history project, and I take lots of photos with my digital camera. I use the GIMP for all sorts of color adjustment, cropping, touch-up, and special effects in my photos, as well as creating the graphics for my web site.

Although I'm not a professional photographer or the like, I still want to organize and manage my images in a professional manner. In my job as a programmer, I use RCS and directory hierarchies to organize and care for my code -- why shouldn't I treat my images with as much care?

I have needs that GIMP doesn't meet by itself. For example, I want to organize my images. Not just into folders, but according to varying criteria, such as date taken, subject, exhibit (whether an image has been used in a web site or document), etc.

Also, I want to track different versions of my images. I typically keep several versions: the raw scan, the first touch-up (after scratch removal, color correction, and other tweaks), a cropped version (because I might crop differently for different uses), and several scalings: the full original, a 640x480 web-site size, and a thumbnail. I want a tool that helps me manage all these versions, track where they've been used, and jump among them (or call them up in GIMP).

Organizing images is an area that's coming along nicely, with the development of gPhoto and Photodex, but these tools only address that one area of concern. And to be truly useful, they need to be well-integrated with the GIMP, so that one can edit an image with a double-click.

I have heard that Photodex will eventually have integration with the GIMP, but that appears to be some way away. Photodex also has the problem that it isn't open source, and probably won't ever be.

GPhoto shows great promise, but it appears to have some overlaps with the GIMP. For example, it has its own color correction dialog. I'd prefer to see gPhoto integrated with the GIMP for image editing, rather than trying to provide its own. GPhoto has great digital camera support so far, its greatest strength. Good digicam management is another need for a complete image management tool suite.

What about version control? No one out there seems to be thinking at all about this. Maybe because it's a wacko idea -- but I for one would find it useful.

Version control of images needn't be difficult. Of course, you couldn't do it the same way RCS does it, with content diffs. Storage requirements would get way out of hand; just saving the individual versions would require less.

A better idea, one that could be accomplished with the help of the GIMP, would be to record all the mousing, keystrokes, and dialog interaction that goes into the editing of an image; these are the "diffs". This data could be stored far more compactly than storing all the image versions. You could play back the edits on the original raw scan to produce any intermediate or final version. If it takes too long to play back from the original, you could store full binary versions of significant intermediate versions.

None of this is intended to slam the GIMP, Photodex or gPhoto. Just some ramblings on where I'd like to see image management go in the open-source world.

--JT