Thanks to everyone who offered answers to this question, especially 
to Jeremy Reed who helped me sort out all of the sometimes seemingly 
conflicting suggestions I received. The following "by-the-numbers" steps 
may not work for everyone, but after several days of wrestling with this, 
below is a concise recap of the steps that worked for me.  Hope this may 
be of some help to someone else. 

1. Connect camera to computer via USB port and turn on camera 
2. su to root 
3. cat /proc/bus/usb/devices 	(to confirm that camera is seen by usb port) 
4. cat /proc/scsi/scsi 		(to confirm that camera is a scsi device) 
5. fdisk -l 			(to see which usb camera is on - mine was sdb1) 
6. mkdir -p /mnt/camera		(to create a mount point for the camera) 
7. mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/camera 
8. cp -rav /mnt/camera/* /home/joe/photos/(setdate) 
9. umount /mnt/camera 
10. disconnect camera from usb port 

I still don't understand whether I need to edit /etc/fstab 
to add one of these three: 
/dev/sda1 /mnt/film vfat rw,noauto,user 0 0  (or perhaps) 
/dev/sda1 /mnt/film msdos ro,noauto,user 0 0 (or perhaps) 
/dev/sda1 /mnt/film auto ro,noauto,user 0 0 
... and/or take some other steps that might further simplify connecting 
my camera each time I want to download photos.  Isn't there something 
called a "hotplug" scenario that allows one to connect or disconnect 
the camera and the connection will be automatically recognized? 

Thanks again to all ... 

Joe 





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