Greetings! Here be a tale or two. Red Hat 9, by the way, on a Compaq Armada 1750 laptop with USB port.

To begin at the beginning. For some time I've had a Disgo 256MB USB memory stick. I have had no trouble using this, able to remove it and re-insert it at any time, mount it, and access the files. I set up an entry in /etc/fstab for it which says:

/dev/sda1 /flash auto noauto,suid,dev,exec,user 0 0

so, once I've inserted it and something-or-other goes through a detection process, I can 'mount /flash' and all is well.

Or was.

Yesterday, I spotted a Fujifilm FinePix F440 digital camera on sale at a very interesting price. After checking out reviews (all pretty favourable for general usage) I went back and bought it. A bit speculatively from the Linux point of view, but I reckoned that a similar approach to the USB stick would work.

Since it has been some time since the USB stick was last used, the laptop has been rebooted a time of two since then.

Having taken a few test photos, I then connected the camera to the USB port, switched it on, waited for the "detect", and then as usual ran 'mount /flash'. Again, all went well, I could download the picture files (JPG) and they were good. Then ran 'umount /flash' and disconnected the camera.

Then I tried its "video" function: you can take up to 60 secs of video (with sound) with this camera, which gives you a 4MB AVI file. Again, no problem re-connecting the camera and down- loading the AVI file. (And, by the way, 'xanim' plays these files well).

So far so good, and I repeated the above tests a few time (again, disconnecting and reconnecting the camera to the USB port, with 'mount /flash' and 'umount /flash' each time). It looked as though this arrangement would work just the same as for the USB memory stick.

But then, to try to explore the reason for something unexpected (see "FINAL INDEPENDENT QUESTION" at end), I inserted the USB memory stick. Unusual and unpromising messages on "autodetect", and 'mount /flash' gave message "mount: No medium found". FAILURE!!

So I then explored with happens if I reboot. It's a long story, but this is the summary:

A. Repeated connection disconnection of same device following a reboot.

1. Reboot. Insert USB memory stick. It works fine first time, as above. Remove USB stick, reinsert. FAILURE. And it fails every time I re-try unless I reboot.

2. Reboot. Connect camera. Works fine, as above. Switch off camera, disconnect. Re-connect, switch on, and it works fine. Ad infinitum without reboot.

B. Alternating connection of the two devices following a reboot.

3. Reboot. Insert USB memory stick. Works fine as at (1). remove USB stick, connect camera. Camera fails (message "no medium found" on 'mount /flash'). Disconnect camera, insert USB memory stick, stick fails (message "/dev/sda1 is not a valid block device" on 'mount /flash'). Exactly the same failure for Camera as previous camera failure. Exactly the same failure for Stick as previous stick failure. Ditto ad infinitum with Camera/Stick/Camera/...

4. Reboot. Connect camera. Works fine as at (2). Disconnect camera, insert Stick. Stick fails with "no medium found". Remove stick, connect camera. Camera OK as at (2). Disconnect camera, insert stick. Stick fails again in exctaly the same way. Camera OK. Stick fails. Camera OK. And so on.

SO: Whichever device is first in following a reboot works fine first time.

If Stick is first in, it only works first time, and fails subsequently, and Camera always fails.

If Camera is first in, it works first time and every time, whether Stick has been used or not; but Stick always fails.

So that's the situation. If I only use the Camera, there would be no problem. But I would have to reboot each time I want to use the Stick, whether I have used the Camera or not!

Any ideas? (I suspect I may have tickled Red Hat's "kudzu" in some way it didn't like, but I've never managed to disentangle what goes on with kudzu).

FINAL INDEPENDENT QUESTION: This is what got the above saga rolling (though I'd have hit it some time anyway). I wanted to transfer the Camera files directly to a different machine networked to the laptop (since I usually keep stuff like photos on the other). Rather than download from Camera to laptop and then ftp them across, I thought I'd try downloading to Machine 2 direct from the camera via NFS.

So, with the Camera connected to the laptop and mounted on /flash, from machine 2, I (as root) NFS-mounted the laptop's root directory machine 2. The directory of the Camera memory chip was visible on the laptop, type VFAT, and 'ls .flash' etc. showed all the files on the Camera. However, while the laptop's file system (including the presence of /flash, and files in other directories) was visible from Machine 2, 'ls laptop/flash' showed an empty directory on machine 2.

This was unexpected, so I wondered if it had something to do with the fact that what was mounted on the laptop's /flash directory was a USN storage device, was a peculiarity of the camera, or whatever..

Hence I thought I would experiment by trying to NFS-mount the laptop with the Stick in instead. So I plugged in the stick, did 'mount /flash', and then found myself in the above Saga!

Therefore, is anyone can answer this independent question as well (or instead of) the business about Stick/Camera conflict, I'd be interested!

Thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 26-Jun-05 Time: 14:50:31 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------