My [[http://www.dpreview.com/news/0601/06010405hpm425.asp|HP Photosmart M425]] used to work perfectly on my laptop, which runs Kubuntu. On my shiny new desktop I’ve been running Debian Unstable/Experimental, and all of a sudden my camera stopped working with it. Digikam would detect it, but wouldn’t let me read the snaps off of it.

After some investigation, I figured out that the relevant [[wp>Udev|udev]] rules were missing from the Debian package. As a result, even though I was in the group ”plugdev”, I couldn’t read the camera but I could still read it as root. If you’re facing the same problem, here’s what you need to do:

* create a new file ”/etc/udev/rules.d/z80_custom.rules”
* paste the following lines into this file

ACTION!="add", GOTO="libgphoto2_rules_end"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", GOTO="libgphoto2_rules_real"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", GOTO="libgphoto2_rules_real"
BUS!="usb", GOTO="libgphoto2_rules_end"
LABEL="libgphoto2_rules_real"
SYSFS{idVendor}=="03f0", SYSFS{idProduct}=="8002", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"
LABEL="libgphoto2_rules_end"

* make sure you belong to the group ”plugdev” and restart udev

Thats it!

Note that these instructions are for a Debian based system, but it should be relatively easy to adapt them to other systems as well.