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USB Xfer in Linux (Mint)


boojum

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Question now is: why does Mint access the camera using the PTP protocol when Windows apparently uses the Mass Storage protocol? As far as I can remember, you set an option in the camera which controlled whether the camera used the USB connection with the PTP or the Mass Storage protocol. That's what my Sony NEX does, only it offers "MTP" instead of "PTP" and it also offers automatic detection.

When set to "Mass Storage" or to "Auto", the file manager (Nautilus in my case) shows the name of the storage card in the NEX and the usual folders like DCIM, Leica... and finally my pictures.

When set to "MTP", the file manager shows pretty much what is shown at the beginning of this thread: the entry shows the camera name (NEX 5N, in my case), and the contents are some digital innards of the device (not, in my case, any RAMDISKs but a number of directories and files I've never seen before, possibly some firmware files).

I can find no option in the manual for the M8 which lets you select the protocol to be used for the USB connection. However, it must be possible to use the connection in mass storage mode; Windows does it.

Is this a gphoto setting? If there is gphoto on my computer, it's fairly well hidden.

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11 hours ago, pop said:

My 150$ phone runs circles around the 6M$ mainframe computer I used back in 1974. US$ 1500 for a dumb terminal must have been a steal in 1980. Moore's law, I believe.

Back before writing  code I was a "tape ape" or computer operator.  We had a 1401 with the big memory package, 16K!  Yes!  Did all the banks DDA, mortgage, loan and payroll services.

16K!

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OK, here is what I expect for support from a high end manufacturer.  I did recording for about 10 years.  Good mics, like Schoeps, DPA, Pearl, and Samar stereo ribbons.  My recording hardware was from Sound Devices. When they screw up it is, "Send us the box and we will fix it gratis."  Regular tune-ups and/or repairs are quick, like a week, and a flat rate which is reasonable.  They bend over backwards over the phone or via email to keep me happy.  The 788T I have has a noisy channel 7.  My last communication was send it in and we will fix it for free.  Their current top of the line recorder, the Scorpio, is just under US$10K.  These are quality, and expensive, products.

In a double-blind test against the vaunted Nagra even the Nagra fanboys could not pick which was the better.  As is stands now SD has eaten Nagra's lunch.  How?  Great product and world class customer support.  And if a bunch of farmers in Wisconsin can do this what's going on at Leica?  Being treated like a miserable penitent before the exalted priesthood is not what pleases me.  It is something I will have to live with.  It's a given.  That's just the way it is.  Wait months and pay an exorbitant fee.  That's not good.  We have an expression out here which echoes the feeling of Leica service. It's like being screwed and not kissed after. 

To defend against this arrogant Leica service policy I will make every effort to have any problems that might crop up fixed by my local guy.  If the "Leica Guy" is able to delaminate the M9 sensor to hot rod it I guess he can do a lot of other stuff.  And when I  go in there they are friendly, helpful and offer a quick turnaround. For Schoeps mic repairs I mail them to the dealer in CT, he bundles them and ships them to Germany once a month.  The turnaround is about a month, no hassle.  The costs are reasonable.

So, I love the cameras.  I decry the Leica company service policy.  But it is how it is.  I have to take the rough with the smooth.  But if someone asks me about Leica factory repair I will tell them only as a last resort.  If I have ruffled some feathers I apologize.  We are all entitled to our own opinions.  We can't all agree.  And I love the cameras.  I've bought three in a month.  When I hold a Leica I hold a quality product.  I paid about as much for one M240 used as I did for the SONY A7M II with the 55mm Zeiss and the 24 - 240mm SONY new..  I cannot let the service policy discourage me against what is universally acknowledged as a great camera.

Dixi  LOL

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5 hours ago, pop said:

Question now is: why does Mint access the camera using the PTP protocol when Windows apparently uses the Mass Storage protocol? As far as I can remember, you set an option in the camera which controlled whether the camera used the USB connection with the PTP or the Mass Storage protocol. That's what my Sony NEX does, only it offers "MTP" instead of "PTP" and it also offers automatic detection.

When set to "Mass Storage" or to "Auto", the file manager (Nautilus in my case) shows the name of the storage card in the NEX and the usual folders like DCIM, Leica... and finally my pictures.

When set to "MTP", the file manager shows pretty much what is shown at the beginning of this thread: the entry shows the camera name (NEX 5N, in my case), and the contents are some digital innards of the device (not, in my case, any RAMDISKs but a number of directories and files I've never seen before, possibly some firmware files).

I can find no option in the manual for the M8 which lets you select the protocol to be used for the USB connection. However, it must be possible to use the connection in mass storage mode; Windows does it.

Is this a gphoto setting? If there is gphoto on my computer, it's fairly well hidden.

Ach, Du Alte. I screwed up the courage to do a hot plug in of the camera and it works!  It shows the images just fine.  Woohoo!  Thank you so much und auch Vielen Dank.  ;o)

I have no idea what is going on, (I wrote COBOL), and what goes on "beneath the sheets" is beyond my understanding.  But I do know that now it works.  I may have to change the saying to "Es ist immer Schweizer besser."

I do have the final release of firmware.  And it was so maddening to have the xfer work in Linux and W10 and then stop working.  Could I have hot swapped those times it worked?  I think not. The important part part is the the USB xfer now works and I do not have to go through disrobing the camera to extract the card and so on. Just plug the USB cable into the camera, turn it on and plug it into the computer.  Again, thank you.

Edited by boojum
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9 minutes ago, jaapv said:

Umm... for a fourteen year old camera? Give me a break...

Seventeen year old washer dryer and they run perfectly.  Twenty year old SONY DSC S70 and it works just great.  Thirty year old stereo receiver and it works just great.  Forty year old ReVox CD player and it works just great. Thirty year old table radio and it works just great.  But a fourteen year old Leica is expected to fail?  To me that is not supportable.  But, thankfully, we do not have to agree on this.  You can accept this without question.  I cannot.

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1 minute ago, jaapv said:

No - and it does not  fail. But you cannot expect fourteen year old electronic devices to work well with present-day software. That is unreasonable

The M8 and M8.2 are not working with current firmware.  The drivers in Linux and in W10 are almost always backward compatible.  Imagine a new release of either OS that no longer supported all sorts of external hardware.  And the firmware in the M8 and M8.2 was written in conformity to industry wide OS specs.  Conformity is critical.  Nvidia is currently or was recently in an imbroglio over their non-standard software that was playing havoc with W10 and Linux.  While the PC world is nowhere near as closed as the Apple world it still does have rules so that everybody can play in the same yard.  There would be havoc without the rules. I have a pair of really old Sound Devices 722's that work just fine in W10 or Linux. Generally speaking if a board does not fail in the first 90 days it will have a good, long life.   Unless the board is flawed.

You see my deal is that a product with the reputation that Leica has should one have world class electronics and two have a lot better customer support.  This haughty attitude that the factory has that you can just wait months and months and then pay an exorbitant fee for this tardy delivery displeases me.  It also diminishes the product reputation.  It will not grow a customer base.  It discourages customers from going to Wetzlar for repairs. 

Just for the sake of discussion tell me of what other companies you know who exercise this callous attitude with their customers as does Leica.

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6 minutes ago, boojum said:

Just for the sake of discussion tell me of what other companies you know who exercise this callous attitude with their customers as does Leica.

That's a heavily loaded question based on your personal opinion and containing an assumed 'truism' to affirm it.  Good luck to anybody trying to answer that without getting dragged into a lengthy argument.

Pete.

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19 minutes ago, farnz said:

That's a heavily loaded question based on your personal opinion and containing an assumed 'truism' to affirm it.  Good luck to anybody trying to answer that without getting dragged into a lengthy argument.

Pete.

Pete, yes and no.  The slow and expensive repairs at the German Leica factory are much discussed in this forum.  It is common knowledge.  Painfully so. It is a difficult relationship we have.  And I am perplexed how it is so and why.  No one can say the service offers a quick turnaround and is reasonably priced. What about the pro's?  Months waiting for a piece of gear to be repaired?  From where I stand comparing to Leica other high-end electro-mechanical gear manufacturers the factory is nowhere near the top.  And it is not just me.  There are many threads which discuss this.  I am the rat in the woodpile who is willing to say out loud this is not how it should be. The factory manners are a disincentive to patronizing them.  Leica can afford to hire a few more people and put an end to this painfully slow turnaround time.  And that would be great PR.  Imagine someone on the board talking about getting their camera back in weeks not months.  Really, just think about that.  "I sent it in for a CLA and got it back in three weeks." My point is that is how it should be to be current with like manufacturers.  And it is not unreasonable.  I do not like being treated like the red-headed stepchild.

You know I like the cameras.  And if it ever stops raining here I will be out and about Leica-izing my county. We get 80+ inches of rain a year here in town (https://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/oregon/astoria).  The next three months are brutal.  My argument is that the factory could be doing a lot better job than they are.  I do not think that this is disputable.  And, as always, YMMV.

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vor 7 Stunden schrieb boojum:

I have no idea what is going on, (I wrote COBOL), and what goes on "beneath the sheets" is beyond my understanding.

COBOL was my first language, too. About two dozen other languages followed later. My employer also used to have a 1401 before I joined them. There were still two colleagues, one with white hair and the other with possibly white hair (hard to tell because he had no hair left) who took care of the venerable applications that were emulated on the IBM/360 mainframe. When they talked shop, no one knew what they were talking about. They had given up talking shop a long time ago, it seemed.

I suggested trying to hot plug the M8 because I thought there was a distinct possibility that we have a racing condition, sort of. When you switch on the M8, it goes through a lengthy process turning on all its services and routines and so on. If the device manager in the Mint box stopped looking for services in the newly attached M8 before it had initialized all of them, it could have found the PTP port but not the mass storage port (which may be using the PTP port, too). Which would have been consistent with your problem description. If so, you should direct your rant at the Linux people who implemented a too short time limit for finding the port. However, that's speaking of the gift horse.

It could have completely different causes, the way you hold your mouth or which buttock you sit on when plugging the camera in, who knows. But we'll leave it at that, if it works.

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vor 32 Minuten schrieb LocalHero1953:

I put this down to operator error

The manual states clearly that you have to remove the rubber plug from the socket on the camera before pluggin in the cable. It sayy nothing about when to turn on the camera, but is very explicit about when not turning it off. 

I won't go into the "oddities of Linux". They're all odd, and many times I had to spend days and weeks searching for problems which were caused by Microsoft not keeping to the standards they had helped to create or spread. As someone better than me once commented: If architects worked like software engineers, the first woodpecker coming along would lie the western civilization to ruins.

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Yes, Linux is not the only system with oddities, but I just find them more impenetrable. I did once decide that linux had to be the future, and switched my system to ubuntu for about six months. I don't suppose I had any more problems with it than I had when I ventured in to Apple world with a Mac Mini for a couple of years, or anyone else would have trying Windows for the first time. But with Apple and Windows, a quick internet search will produce someone who explains your problem and solution at a technical level that matches yours. Searching for help on linux produced nothing but technical geekery IME. I'm sure its better than that, but only being half way to geekery myself I wanted a source of solutions I could understand, not a text I couldn't read without a dictionary to hand.

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9 hours ago, boojum said:

Pete, yes and no.  The slow and expensive repairs at the German Leica factory are much discussed in this forum.  It is common knowledge.  Painfully so. It is a difficult relationship we have.  And I am perplexed how it is so and why.  No one can say the service offers a quick turnaround and is reasonably priced. What about the pro's?  Months waiting for a piece of gear to be repaired?  From where I stand comparing to Leica other high-end electro-mechanical gear manufacturers the factory is nowhere near the top.  And it is not just me.  There are many threads which discuss this.  I am the rat in the woodpile who is willing to say out loud this is not how it should be. The factory manners are a disincentive to patronizing them.  Leica can afford to hire a few more people and put an end to this painfully slow turnaround time.  And that would be great PR.  Imagine someone on the board talking about getting their camera back in weeks not months.  Really, just think about that.  "I sent it in for a CLA and got it back in three weeks." My point is that is how it should be to be current with like manufacturers.  And it is not unreasonable.  I do not like being treated like the red-headed stepchild.

You know I like the cameras.  And if it ever stops raining here I will be out and about Leica-izing my county. We get 80+ inches of rain a year here in town (https://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/oregon/astoria).  The next three months are brutal.  My argument is that the factory could be doing a lot better job than they are.  I do not think that this is disputable.  And, as always, YMMV.

Boojum,

I will not help to turn this thread into a Leica-bashing thread centred around their repair performance.  Perhaps the point you have missed when you say that "It is common knowledge." is that the only people who start the discontent threads are the ones who have experienced slow repair times for whatever reason and you rarely or never hear from the far greater number of us (the silent majority?) who have been completely happy with repair time.  This is why I object to the assumption that Leica's repair times are necessarily 'below par' or that everyone here - or who uses Leica equipment but is not here - holds that view.  The forum's membership currently stands at 76,418 and but I recall fewer than, say, twenty threads over the forum's 20-year history that complain about repair times.  That's quite a disparity.

Please don't misunderstand me, I expect we'd all like same day turnaround if it was practicable but of course it's not - owing to the sheer logistics - so your take on what is acceptable turnaround is entirely subjective (ie YMMV).  

If the turnaround time is too slow then Leica offers an accelerated professional service for those whose work depends on having their equipment to hand. I understand from those on the forum who have used that service that it is very fast and rivals Canon's professional service.  Leica's courier picks up the equipment and drops it back removing the inconvenience of shipping etc.  It's important to remember that Leica is essentially a small company a fraction the size and turnover of Canon, Nikon, Sony etc so their resource is similarly pro rata.

Please don't mistake me for a 'fanboy', I am not.  Leica can do, and do do, wrong and I'm happy to call them on it when they do but they also get a lot more things right.

As for your "being treated like the red-headed stepchild" I find the saying distasteful and I don't see you being treated any differently from anyone else.  Only recently you stated that you were very happy to be warmly welcomed and that the forum has been very helpful.  I hope that view continues.

Pete.

 

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