@knro I don't think we should give up support, in fact I think we're close, especially with the possible use of external trigger like a few Nikons do. I tested the external trigger and bulbing works great with it while using the wait and download command from gphoto, so that should make it doable in any case, Many models will likely work, though we need more testers to report on it, the fact that there aren't many complaints is a good sign, especially after the announcement about the new additions to main libgphoto2. Most of the functions are working in the current version (with the dial set to user mode) and I have seen it work at least for exposures on earlier versions of kstars/ekos. This might be just an error introduced while sorting some other camera brand since there are so many attributed to this one driver.
@Gbeaton Good to see you got something working. depending on distro, you can usually open the system file manager and access volume management that way in order to set automount of plugged in devices to off. Which Linux distro/version are you using that works? I'm not above making partition space to run this thing.
Could it be that the repositories are lagging as they do? if so it might lend credence to my idea that this may be a new bug. It may also be that the K5 is older and may not be susceptible to the bulb issue the k50 has. The software changing the camera to bulb and doing the timing externally(pc side) would work just fine on those models and you wouldn't even notice if it was doing that instead of setting exposure unless debug showed it.
I'll go give this another couple hours of head scratching, this time from a code perspective.
--why is it changing to bulb, and why is it reporting exposure as empty..and are they related?
--And the other line of questioning-- why didn't it change to external trigger when I set the port? --does RTS toggle high/low or low/high? Does it trigger once and hold or does it trigger and then retrigger to close? and can't we just send a string like BOO or something?
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