[NTLUG:Discuss] Mounting USB portable drive

[Steve Baker]

Peter A. Koren wrote:

> I have a RHEL4 based distribution (Scientific Linux 4.0) and I want to
> use a USB2 pen type drive that takes an SD memory card. I formatted the
> card in a digital camera (a Canon Power Shot S2 IS). So I suppose that I
> just have to insert the pen drive with the SD card in a USB2 slot, wait
> for automount to mount it and then access the files -- JPEGs for the
> pictures, AVIs for the movies and WAV files for the sound. Is that all
> that there is to it?

Yep.

I have a 128Mb memory stick, a 20Gb USB hard drive, an Olympus still camera,
a SONY movie camera and my son's MP3 player - they all use USB filesystems
and I can plug any or all of them in - wait 10 seconds and look in
the /media directory and there will be a directory for each one that's
connected.

What's there is 'just files' - usually in recognisable formats - you
can copy them, make new directories on the device, delete files - just
as if your camera or whatever were a regular DOS partition mounted on
your Linux box.

I've even done things that the manufacturers of these devices don't
claim they can do.

For example, my still camera can record 20 second video snippets - and
it has video cables so I can hook it up to my TV set and watch them
play right out of the camera.

Well - I had a two minute long animation that my son and I rendered
using blender.  To show to a crowd of people on our big screen TV,
I copied our animation onto the camera's memory and was able to play
it on our TV just as if the camera had recorded it itself - even
though it was far longer than the maximum the camera could have
recorded by itself!  (I was quite suprised when that worked - but
I was desperate!)

I've also used cameras as if they were memory sticks - copying
OpenOffice documents onto them on one computer and reading the
files back on another PC.

The movie camera has a recordable mini-DVD drive for bulk storage -
but if I want to read the files off on a computer without a DVD drive
of it's own, I can just connect the camera via USB and wait for it to
mount - and I have a USB mini-DVD reader right there.

USB filesystem devices work REALLY well on my SuSE system and are
particularly nice because you can buy them with confidence without
having to worry about the nausea of finding and installing Linux
device drivers for them.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
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