The Minolta Dimage S304 is a nice digital camera. It takes very crisp pictures and has a movie mode which can take 60-second movies. The only problem I have with it is that it does a piss-poor job telling you if the batteries are low. In a nutshell, it gives you no warning at all so I've been stuck twice now with a dead camera.

The camera comes with Windows software which seems to work OK but I like to use GNU/Linux so I'm trying to get it to work with that OS.

The S304 uses USB to connect to the PC so the first thing I need to do is get the kernel USB driver working. http://edelweiss.qbik.ch/usb/devices/showdev.php?id=1010 indicates that it should work - and the 2.4.18 kernel already has the code that it needs.

gphoto seems to be the default GNOME camera management software.

When I connect the camera's USB connector I get this in /var/log/messages:

May  1 11:13:16 dickless kernel: usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using address 2
May  1 11:13:16 dickless kernel: scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
May  1 11:13:16 dickless kernel:   Vendor: MINOLTA   Model: DIMAGE  CAMERA    Rev: 1.00
May  1 11:13:16 dickless kernel:   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
May  1 11:13:16 dickless kernel: SCSI device sda: 125152 512-byte hdwr sectors (64 MB)
May  1 11:13:16 dickless kernel: sda: assuming Write Enabled
May  1 11:13:16 dickless kernel:  /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0:<7>usb-storage: queuecommand called
May  1 11:13:16 dickless kernel:  p1
May  1 11:13:17 dickless scsi.agent[2348]:      sd_mod: loaded sucessfully (for disk)
May  1 11:13:17 dickless kernel: Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
May  1 11:13:17 dickless usb.agent[2367]:      usb-storage: already loaded
May  1 11:13:21 dickless gconfd (tobyc-2260): Resolved address "xml:readwrite:/home/tobyc/.gconf" to a writable configuration source at position 0
May  1 11:13:42 dickless kernel: VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sda.

At that point I need to mount the camera file system by hand like so:

tobyc@dickless:~$ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera/

... and I can copy the pictures from the camera.