Archive for the 'Computer Related' Category

I’ve had my Canon Digital Ixus 700 (Powershot SD500) for almost a year, and I have used it daily. I am using Gentoo GNU/Linux on my Acer Aspire laptop, and I have connected the camera to it with no problems (using gphoto2 as the lowlevel interface and Digikam for managing the photos). However, some days ago, I updated my system software, including libgphoto2, and something happened. I could not longer access my camera. Then I remembered that I’ve seen this before, but I did not remember how I solved it last time. Therefore, I’m writing this post, for myself to remember it to next time.

The symptoms are as follow. When running gphoto2 –summary, it says “Detected a ‘Canon:PowerShot SD500 (normal mode)’“, then it fails with the message “Step #4 failed! (returned 0, expected 64) Camera not operational“. I tried with extended debugging information, but it told me nothing of interest.

The solution is simple. This problem is related to a bug in the driver for this very camera. The driver simply doen’t work very well. Luckily, it isn’t needed, since there is a general driver that can be used instead. A simple workaround is to remove the driver. So I did, with the following command: cd /usr/lib/gphoto2/*/ && mkdir old && mv *canon* old/. Problem solved. Thank you for the tip, _Marcus_ at #gphoto@irc.freenode.net!