Here is how I got my brand new Samsung Digimax V4 digital camera working in Linux.

By 'working' I mean, the files on the Secure Digital card are readable while the camera is connected to my PC via USB.

First of all, I am using Linux 2.4.21 on Gentoo (2003-07-18), with an Asus A7V8X motherboard (hence KT400 chipset).

I have a CD burner so I already have the SCSI emulation compiled into my kernel (or as modules). The only extra SCSI module I needed is the SCSI Disk driver (sd_mod.o). I also had Mass Storage support (usb-storage.o) and the USB virtual filesystem support.

After connecting my camera to the USBus, a quick 'dmesg' showed that the camera had been detected. I loaded the usb-storage driver and the SCSI disk driver. I confirmed that it had been picked up as an emulated SCSI device by

$ cat /proc/scsi/usb-storage-0/1

Host scsi1: usb-storage

Vendor: SAMSUNG

Product: DIGIMAX V4

Serial Number: None

Protocol: 8070i

Transport: Bulk

GUID: 083910090000000000000000

Attached: Yes

Also, /dev/sda1 appeared.

To mount the filesystem on the camera's SD card, I simply

$ mount -t msdos /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbfs

And voila!

I think that was all. The hardest part was working out what drivers I needed.

And heres some very rough guidelines for extracting your pictures from a Kodak CX4230 under Linux.

You need to load the USB modules (not sure which ones, I have them built in).

Under Debian the best way is to use gphoto2 - apt-get install gphoto2.

You then want to run: gphoto2 --port "usb:" --camera "Kodak CX4230" -P

This will detect the camera plugged into the USB port.

And with any luck you will have you photos downloaded to $PWD.

After you're done, you can erase the pictures from the camera with gphoto2 --port "usb:" --camera "Kodak CX4230" -D