[ltp] USB memory pen

[Tod Harter]

Yes, under Mandrake 9.0 my Sony camera, model DSC-P1, for instance simply 
shows up "automagically" at /mnt/camera. It is actually device /dev/sda. So 
for normal access I can just make a link on my desktop to /mnt/camera and 
when I attach the camera I can browse there and find all my pictures. What 
the camera actually does is format the memory stick with a fat32 file system, 
and I guess one single primary partition, thus its /dev/sda1. I would assume 
I could use mkfs to create other filesystems on the stick and also muck with 
its partition table with fdisk (but the camera itself would not obviously 
know how to store data on the stick this way when it was operating as a 
camera).

I THINK it would be simple to boot off this as well if it was attached when I 
brought up my system I could have a grub entry to boot off /dev/sda1 and if 
it was a bootable filesystem I see no reason why the machine couldn't boot 
off it...

I guess the question is at what point can you actually access USB Storage 
devices? Maybe someone else can answer this as I haven't researched it much 
myself yet. That is to say would grub need some sort of 'built-in' USB 
support? Or is USB Storage supported in the BIOS? Anyway, it is worth an 
experiment, and I'm sure if you cannot do it today, you will be able to 
tommorrow, and most certainly you could do it via a boot from floppy with the 
properly configured boot floppy.

On Saturday 25 January 2003 02:36 pm, iriXx wrote:
> would the same go for any device that acts as a USB drive?
> i have a digital camera which i can read from windoze as a USB drive, so
> in theory mandrake should mount it as well?
>
> thanx
> m~
>
> Tod Harter wrote:
> > I would assume those pens act as a USB Storage device. That means that
> > they're essentially a removable drive as far as Linux is concerned. In
> > Mandrake at least you can access them right off your desktop.

-- 
Tod Harter
Giant Electronic Brain