Other USB Devices

Apart from the floppy disk drive, I have tried the following USB devices:

Aiptek Pencam Trio Digital Camera.

Upon hot-plugging the camera, it was automatically detected and the stv680 module was loaded. Unfortunately, this is not useful for any of the applications that may wish to access the camera (gtkam and pencam2, for example). I received the error message "Unable to claim USB device". The solution is quite simple: remove the module that was loaded (rmmod stv680) and everything will work just fine after that...

I do not know if a similar problem occurs with other digital cameras (e.g. Kodak) but will check.

Lexar Jumpdrive (and other Flash Memory Sticks)

These USB memory storage devices are becoming increasingly popular as an alternative to floppy disks, zipdrives, etc. Unfortunately, although the Jumpdrive is recognised correctly, the Linux "auto mount" facility is not able to determine the filesystem type (vfat). You must specify it explicitly.

Here is an example of how to take some of the pain out of the process:

1. First, unplug your USB Jumpdrive, if it is currently inserted
2. As root, cd /mnt
3. mkdir diskonkey
4. Add this line to /etc/fstab:
   /dev/sda1 /mnt/diskonkey vfat noauto,user,rw 0 0
5. Right-click on your Desktop and create a new Hard Disk Device icon (/dev/sda1)
6. Plug in the USB Jumpdrive. You can then right-click on the HDD icon to mount/unmount it.

Because your file system on this device is FAT formatted, any directories/files stored on it may have their names "changed" to lower-case letters: remember that DOS does not distinguish between upper- and lower-case filenames, and this will lead to confusion when you retrieve the files back onto a Linux-based system. Use this device with caution!

How to Mount a Camera Compact Flash Card

An alternative method of transferring pictures from your camera is to remove the flash memory card from your camera, and mount it in a PCMCIA flash card adapter. Plug in the PCMCIA card, and check what happened (using dmesg). My adapter generates the following messages:

hde: SanDisk SDCFB-48, CFA DISK drive
ide2 at 0x100-0x107,0x10e on irq 3
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
hde: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hde: task_no_data_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
hde: 93952 sectors (48 MB) w/1KiB Cache, CHS=734/4/32
 hde: hde1
ide_cs: hde: Vcc = 3.3, Vpp = 0.0

# cd /mnt
# mkdir flashdisk

mount -t auto -s -r /dev/hde1 /mnt/flashdisk

USB device support under Linux (general):

Details of the support status of other USB devices under Linux can be found at:

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