Does dmesg provide anything interesting of note when you plug in the camera? What might also be happening is that the camera is not behaving like a mass storage device over usb and instead using PTP.

If you can verify that the camera is being connected, perhaps something like libptp can help:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...ckage_id=32213

Most cameras only seem to support the file download portion of ptp but it seems it's possible on some cameras to manipulate properties and even trigger the camera. (I was hoping my camera would allow time setting since I could of used the it set the sync datetimes from gps to camera for the exif stamps for later geotagging. Didn't... boohoo)