Hari's Corner

Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then

When it doesn't work, try 'root' first

Filed under: Bits and Bytes by Hari
Posted on Wed, Feb 7, 2007 at 15:25 IST (last updated: Wed, Jul 16, 2008 @ 21:00 IST)

I've decided to store small bits of useful, but random, information that I usually gather from day-to-day experience as "tidbits." This is my first tidbit...

I was recently trying to get my digital camera (Canon Powershot S50) to work in my laptop and was repeatedly frustrated because gphoto2 refused to detect it. In trying to resolve this problem I logged in as root and by chance I issued the gphoto2 --auto-detect command and found that the camera was detected after all! Turned out that it was a permission problem with the /dev/bus/usb/ folder. Adding the plugdev group to my user account resolved the issue which had been perplexing me for a while. While the solution was absurdly simple and the problem sounds so obvious, I spent hours simply scratching my head wondering why my camera stopped working and even went to the extent of changing the USB cable to see if that was the problem.

So the moral of this story is - if something suddenly stops working in Linux (and particularly if you know it works or it had worked before) it might just turn out to be a simple permissions problem. In this particular case, I suspect that a Debian dist-upgrade had broken the permission which prevented me from accessing the camera. I spent hours on this problem groping around in the dark and googling frantically until I accidentally hit upon the solution which was hinted at in a mailing list archive.

2 comment(s)

  1. man, those mailing list archives are great. They only hint, though. Frustratingly.

    Comment by titanium (visitor) on Wed, Feb 7, 2007 @ 16:40 IST #
  2. Absolutely. It gave me a vague direction as to where to look for the solution. Reading and understanding mailing lists take some effort since they won't always point in the right direction... sifting through all that information and picking only the relevant stuff can be intimidating for a newbie. :shock:

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Feb 7, 2007 @ 17:02 IST #

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