Last night I stayed up until about three a.m. hacking my computer. First I set up SuSE Linux 8.0. Of course the boot CD wouldn't start up properly, so I had to boot from floppies. That worked. The SuSE boot-sequence and installation are pretty nice. The interface is a bit slow, but most things worked and there was plenty of eye-candy. The next problem I ran into was that Icelandic wasn't on any of the lists of languages, even though all the fonts and keymaps were installed - which meant I had to go tweak config files by hand (no problem) and will have to avoid the language settings in YaST2 (the SuSE config tool) from now on (slightly irritating).

Once I had a booting system and a functional keyboard, I proceeded to try and convince SuSE to talk to my new Canon Powershot A30. Finally a reason to use the USB hub in my three-year old (at least?) 19" monitor! Plugging the camera in and turning it on produced nice little "something was plugged in" messages in the system logs, but the version of gphoto2 distributed with SuSE didn't recognize the camera.

Since I hadn't gotten the internet-dialup stuff configured yet, I couldn't go looking for an updated gphoto2, or other help online. So after some head scratching I performed my hack-of-the week: I used hexdump and perl to patch the camera table in the gphoto Canon driver binary, so gphoto would recognize my camera as a PowerShot S40:

  perl -npe 's/V0/Y0/s' <old_driver.so >hacked_driver.so

Two minutes later I was playing back home-made AVI movies in KWinTV and looking at pics of my friends' wedding from earlier that day.

Sweet. :-)

Now what I want to know is, why don't the gphoto guys just use a text-based config-file to match up devices and drivers? Compiling everything into the binaries is dumb!