I spent quite a bit of time this afternoon/evening fiddling with a Dazzle* USB card reader, seeing if I could get things working, as my mom seemed to want me to use it for transferring pictures off of her digital camera onto my computer when I use it. So, I set out to tinker with it.

Of course, it turned out to be not quite so very simple. Gleaning some good info from here, here, and here mostly, I first had to compile a few extra options into my kernel, namely SCSI support (and SCSI device LUN probing, which was the solution to an error message that stumped me for a bit - the reader has multiple card slots).

Of course, after all this work, it doesn't seem that the card is compatible with Linux. I tried mounting it as vfat and a few other less likely options, but come up with this error:

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /media/usb0 FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sdb. mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb, missing codepage or other error In some cases useful information is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or such

Dmesg pretty much iterates the same thing.

There's always the possibility that I could be wrong; however, I'm going to leave that around at least for a while. It's not imperative that it works, at any rate, as retrieving photos works fine using gtkam/gphoto2. (That is one thing that's odd, though - I can retrieve the files fine that way off the same card. Perhaps it's the card reader...)