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Thursday December 23, 2004

Whoohoo! gtkam & USB on Solaris 10
With a little help from Frits, I got my Canon Powershot S45 digital camera connected via USB to my Toshiba Tecra M1, all running Solaris 10, build 74. The most important steps are:

# add_drv -i '"device_id"' ugen

See the ugen(7D) man page for more details; there is also some information and hints in /usr/sfw/share/doc/libusb/libusb.txt. The key trick I discovered is that it is critical to get the device ID correct. To figure that out, look in your prtconf -v output. You need to find the compatible property. In my case, for my camera, this was as follows (see also the full screen shot).

name='compatible' type=string items=9
  value='usb4a9,306c.1' + 'usb4a9,306c' + 'usb4a9,classff.ff.ff' +
  'usb4a9.classff.ff' + 'usb4a9.classff' + 'usb,classff.ff.ff' +
  'usb,classff.ff' + 'usb,classff' + 'usb,device'

For whatever reason, you need to get the binding to the most specific device (i.e., the first in the list). So for me:

# add_drv -m '* 0666 root sys' -i '"usb4a9,306c.1"' ugen

Also make sure to get the quoting exactly right, as I specify above. Now, unplug your camera, and plug it back in. Check with prtconf -D and make sure ugen has bound to the device. If not, you might need to just reboot. Anyway, double check the device permissions, and correct them to taste. If you've followed along they should be 0666 at this point. The device appears as /dev/usb/id/0/... (0 is the USB 'interface' number). Just chmod 666 the device nodes if they're not right.

At this point (I think) you should be able to run gphoto2. In build 74 and later, this appears in /usr/demo/jds/bin, since it's not officially supported by Sun.

$ /usr/demo/jds/bin/gphoto2 --auto-detect
Model                          Port          
----------------------------------------------------------
Canon PowerShot S45 (normal mode) usb:

If that doesn't work, try the --debug flag. Next up, try /usr/demo/jds/bin/gtkam, and see if it works. Good luck! Frits also mentioned that the USB folks are working on ways of making this process a little less arduous in the future. See also the new USB on Solaris FAQ.

P.S.: the pics are from my friends Dave and Amy's recent wedding.

P.P.S: Clicking on the thumbnail will also get you a nice shot of my desktop setup on S10_74.
(2004-12-23 01:45:06.0) Permalink Comments [2]
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Comments:

Since Sun got it work, when can we see it as part of Solaris DVD so we don't have to type all these cryptic commands?

Posted by e1_ang on January 10, 2005 at 06:43 AM PST #

I'm not sure I understand your question. All of the software I'm using is on the Solaris 10 install (make sure you have the latest!). You don't need to add anything. However, you do need to do some configuration to get it to work properly. I agree that this is a pain, but for now, it's the best we can do. As I said in my post, we do hope to improve this over time.

Posted by Dan Price (192.18.42.11) on January 12, 2005 at 05:22 PM PST
Website: http://blogs.sun.com/dp #