It's nice to be able to report a success, particularly in what can otherwise be a weak-spot to GNU/Linux, that of interfacing to hardware which is supplied only with Windows (or occasionaly Mac) drivers.

Having bought a nice new digital camera, my first attempt at getting pictures off it was on Linux. It took about 30 seconds to install gphoto2 and about a further 30 seconds or so to fetch all the pictures from the camera.

Next I was round a friend's and tried to fetch the pictures from the camera to a Windows PC to view them on the screen. After putting in the software disc from the manufacturer the PC spent a good ten minutes running InstallShield for what seemed like an infinite series of related components eventually coming to a halt when one of the instances of InstallShield seemed to reach some kind of deadlock. After a reboot and a second attempt things were no better - in fact it was more than InstallShield that had to be killed with Task Manager.

The windows new hardware wizard did detect the camera once and offered a choice of application. After picking the one from the manufacter and finding, not to any great suprise, that it didn't work there wasn't any obvious way of getting back to that choice despite not having clicked the "remember my choice" checkbox. Unplugging the camera and plugging in again, cycling the power on the camera and another reboot of the PC all failed to get back to that dialog.

So, after a frustrating half hour in front of the windows PC I took the camera home, fetched the photos with gphoto2 and in less than a minute I'd e-mailed them back to my friend.

Steve.