Using an Olympus Digital Camera with FreeBSD

I have an Olympus D-550 digital camera.  It's quite easy to use, and produces high quality pictures.  I bought mine for $300, so it's affordable even for poor students like myself.

The main reason I chose to buy an Olympus camera as opposed to some other kind is because it works well with FreeBSD.  Many digital cameras use proprietary protocols to transfer pictures from camera to computer.  Olympus digital cameras appear to the host computer as USB mass storage devices, so getting the pictures is a simple matter of plugging in the camera and mounting it as a DOS filesystem.  Here's the line I put in my /etc/fstab file for the camera:

/dev/da0s1c             /camera         msdos   ro,noauto       0       0

Once the camera is connected to the computer, I just run the command "mount /camera" as root. If you have other USB mass storage devices connected to your computer, you might need to use a different device name.  And of course, your system must have the USB drivers compiled into the kernel.  Recent FreeBSD versions support USB quite nicely.  I'm using FreeBSD 4.6.2-RELEASE on a Sony N505VE laptop.