Canon DSLR and Linux II

I’ve been busy not writing (that is, doing other things) and have discovered that Linux can control both of my Canon Digital Rebels at the same time. It turns out there is a bug in gphoto2 that ignores the –port setting if you didn’t also supply a –camera setting. If you supply –camera, you must supply –port, but the reverse is not supposed to be true. In any event, it’s easy enough to work around and I can now talk to both cameras.

And in the more good news, there was already a patch floating around to fix another problem I encountered. Whenever I tried to have the camera take a picture, it would hang at the end, eventually throwing an error about a communications failure. Running in debug mode was a little more informative and posting a message to the gphoto2 development list. Someone else followed up reporting the same problem and that a patch had been posted some time back for the Canon 10D but never applied. So I followed his suggesting and modified the patch with the USB ID of the 350D and presto, it works!

So I guess I have another project, namely to write something sort-of like DSLRFocus for Linux but that will let me run multiple cameras.