[ILUG] Firewire Camcorder & Hardware drivers

[Chris Higgins]

I bought a camcorder a few years ago, and it had a firewire
port on it... I upgraded the laptop earlier this year and it also
had a firewire port on it.

Two days ago I bought a firewire cable.

Tonite I plugged my camcorder into my laptop.

sudo apt-get install kino

sudo kino

pressed play, and the camcorder jumped into life, and on screen came 
the footage from the tape, and from the speakers lept the sound.

Stunned !

When I bought the firewire cable I also picked up an extra stack of
blank CD-R, and they happened to come with a free mini digital
camera ( USB ) that hangs on your key ring.

apt-get install gphoto2

sudo gphoto2 --auto-detect

and presto chango it discovered the little camera and I was able
to copy the files off

I'm stunned.. it's been a while since I've put anything vaguely
weird near linux, but I don't think that there is any way that
windows would have made that any easier...

No reboots,  no messing.. it just worked.

I'm so used to seeing people suffer with hardware and drivers for
ages before the get them working that I think we may convince ourselves
that non-pc hardware and linux will be hard work, and I was expecting
ages of twiddling and fiddling before either of these would get anywhere.
I didn't even expect the little cheapo digital camera to work at all.

Now if I could just find a way to get local parents to keep their kids in
and away from the fireworks, I could actually go get some sleep :-(
Past midnight here, and we could be in iraq - some of the things going
off are so loud that they are setting off house alarms.

Just thought I'd share the experience.

-- 
Chris Higgins                              
Darach Technology Ltd                      tel: +353-1-6204370
email: chris.higgins at darach.ie          fax: +353-1-6204371
http://www.darach.ie