Digital cameras, mobile phones and music players under Linux - A Simple Trick

DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.: "Digital cameras, mobile phones and music players under Linux

These days, if you buy a digital camera, mobile phone or a digital music player, it is likely to come with a CD containing applications that make it easier for your new device to interact with a personal computer. Invariably, though, the software can only be installed on a system running a recent version of Microsoft Windows and, in case of a few broader-minded companies, on a Macintosh. But what about us, Linux users?

Luckily, we can still use many of these gadgets. That's because they often act as ordinary USB storage devices, which means that you can simply plug them into the USB port, then mount them to browse the directories, photo images, media files, etc. If you are using one of the recent distributions with hotplug and udev, this is a very simple process - first create a new directory, then mount the device like this:

mkdir /mnt/usb
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb

Now you can browse the content of the mounted device in Konqueror, Nautilus or any other file manager you prefer.

Some distributions make things much easier. For example, the latest Linspire will detect a digital camera in your USB port and will automatically launch Lphoto, an application designed for managing digital photographs. Besides Lphoto, there are several other image viewers, including the GTK -based GQview (this is our favourite, with great zoom options and configurable slide shows) or the QT-based KView, among many other choices."

Courtesy of Ladislav Bonar and the kind folks at Distrowatch.