How to symlink devfs devices?

[Roland Smith]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 05:49:24PM +0000, Paul B. Mahol wrote:
> >
> > Is it possible to create a symlink to a device and use the symlink in place
> > of the real device name in FreeBSD, especially in version 7.2?
> >
> > 1. A disk
> >    /dev/camera -> /dev/da0s1

> devfs.conf(5)

Geneally, yes. But not in this case, I think. You don't want any old usb
device to be linked to /dev/camera! USB devices are enumerated in the
sequence thay are plugged in. So there is no hard guarantee that the
camera will always be available as da0s1. It might be da1s1 if another
USB drive was plugged in earlier.

And not all cameras represent themselves as disk devices (USB mass
storage). Lots of modern ones use PTP
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_Transfer_Protocol].

So in this case it might be better to use HAL (via hald(8))
[http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/hal].

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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