Evil Home Stereo

How do you know that Linux becomes mainstream-ready? If stuff happens magically and you don’t know where to start debugging of course.

Seriously: I always had some issues accessing my digicam (an Olympus SP-700) from KDE (actually, Kubuntu): The system always first tried to access it via some magic camera device while it actually offers a standard usb-storage device. I always had to cancel the dialog which offered me to use the first one and wait for the second one to appear. Weird but it worked.

Since I upgraded to Kubuntu 8.04,  the workaround doesn’t help anymore. The second dialog never appears. Not even the /dev/sdx-device is created anymore. So it seems like I’ve actually got to start debugging that stuff. My guess is that its a weird clash between the HAL and/or udev and gphoto2. Ie. somehow gphoto2 (which creates those weird camera devices/mounts) thinks it should handle the camera while it is actually not necessary and the default handler would handle it just fine.

But debugging HAL/udev is actually not as easy as looking at some dmesg output. Looking at /etc/udev/rules.d didn’t help, seems like I’ve got to dig deeper and somehow get some debugging output from the daemons working in the background…

But I shouldn’t complain: Debugging got indeed a lot more complicated, almost as tangled as the Windows stuff. But while both systems work in 99% of all cases, in the remaining 1% I can at least have a look at the sources and grep some plain text config files.