[sclug] Mobile phones, piccies and PC's

[Taiyo Rawle]

--- Neil Haughton <n.a.haughton at bigfoot.com> wrote:

> This isn't really specifically a Linux question, but
> I'm fishing around 
> here.
> 
> My old man has a new mobile phone with a camera, and
> he's awfully 
> excited about it. He wants to use it to send me
> pictures by email, and 
> has asked how he gets the pictures from phone to PC.
> 
> I haven't a clue.
> 
> Can anyone give me a dummies' guide, in an
> O/S-agnostic way, on what the 
> basic building blocks are for this? I assume it
> starts with connecting 
> phone to PC via the USB port, but after that I have
> no idea. He's using 
> Win98, by the way, which isn't a good start I know,
> but there it is.
> 
> All help welcome.
> 
> Now I'm off to celebrate winning the Ashes, and my
> very, very small part 
> in it. :-)


Righty, there are two main methods digicams (including
those of some mobile phones) communicate with a PC via
USB. They are USB mass storage and Pticture Transfer
Protocol (PTP). USB MS is what pendrives and USB hard
drives use and is essentially SCSI over USB, so in
Linux at least such a camera or 'phone will appear as
/dev/sda or sdb or whatever letter it gets assigned.
To acess it's content just mount the device as a
normal drive, if your system doesn't do it
automatically. 

$mount -t vfat /dev/sda /path/to/mountpoint

PTP devices can be accessed using gphoto2 or other
applications.

Mandriva LE2005 automagically opens up konqueror in
file manager view when I plug my digicam in (it uses
USB MS). In prior versions I had to manually mount the
device.

Under windoze it's (if it works and, especially with
'98 doesn't randomly crash the system) just a case of
plug in and the camera automatically appears as a
drive in my computer, or an access application
automatically starts.

If, however the mobile uses some proprietary protocol
and the manufacturer is unwilling to release
programming information then under Linux, you're
stuffed, basically. There are some supported models
but the newer ones seldom work. If this is the case
then you'll need to follow the instructions that came
with the windows software.

Hope this helps!
-Taiyo


	
	
		
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