In Ubuntu, at least in Intrepid, it is easy to open a USB camera like the Canon Powershot G2. You just plug it in and it mounts on the desktop, attractive icon and all. But I couldn’t delete photos from the DCIM card on the camera. [update – although a friend could delete files from his Powershot G10 which has a much smaller sized memory card). It said “Error while deleting” – There was an error deleting xxxxxxxx.jpg. And under Show more details was the terse message “Not supported” 😉 .

Solution – install gphoto2 and gtkam via synaptic.

GTKam is excellent (http://gphoto.sourceforge.net/doc/manual/ref-gtkam.html.

NB to make sure the camera isn’t mounted already (unmount it yourself if by right-clicking on the icon if it appears on your desktop) when connecting to the camera. And make sure the camera hasn’t timed out in the middle (which might confuse you).

One false lead was installing the Canon software e.g. Zoombrowser, under WINE. It worked to a point but … no USB support to enable me to connect to the camera! See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=697238

Anyway, I prefer GTKam.

Using gphoto2 from the terminal can help check some things out. See http://www.gphoto.org/doc/manual/using-gphoto2.html.

From the terminal you should be able to run:

gphoto2 --auto-detect

and get something like:

Model Port
———————————————————-
Canon PowerShot G2 usb:

and as long as the camera isn’t already mounted, (and it hasn’t timed out!) the following should also work:

gphoto2 –list-files

e.g.

Detected a ‘Canon:PowerShot G2’.
There is no file in folder ‘/’.
There is no file in folder ‘/DCIM’.
There are 2 files in folder ‘/DCIM/101CANON’.
#1 IMG_0193.JPG rd 667 KB image/jpeg
#2 IMG_0195.JPG rd 1288 KB image/jpeg
There are 15 files in folder ‘/DCIM/102CANON’.
#3 IMG_0218.JPG rd 1571 KB image/jpeg
etc etc