Ubuntu will already have a version of libgphoto2 installed but we don’t want to use that, as it most likely will be several versions behind. We can’t remove it, however, as that will make the apt package manager very, very sad.

I didn’t want to get into the business of building/maintaining apt packages, so my solution was to install the latest version of libgphoto2 in /usr/local and configure the library path to search there first for dynamic libraries.

NOTE: In order to get my OM-1 Mark II working with libgphoto2, I had to do some extra work by checking out a specific commit and commenting out a specific line as suggested before compiling. Skip the git checkout 0697bb0 and sed command if you don’t need this “fix”.

$ git clone https://github.com/gphoto/libgphoto2.git ~/src/libgphoto2 && cd ~/src/libgphoto2
$ git checkout 0697bb0
$ sed -i '3267s/^/\/\//' camlibs/ptp2/library.c
$ autoreconf -is
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
$ make -j8 && sudo make install

Library Path

Now that a custom compiled version of libgphoto2 has been installed in /usr/local, we need to make sure that ldconfig sees this first, otherwise clients may use the older, preinstalled version instead.

My solution (for better or worse) was to add /usr/local/lib explicitly as the first line in /etc/ld.so.conf:

/usr/local/lib
include /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf

After saving the file, regenerate the cache:

$ sudo ldconfig