Capturing Firewire 1394 camcorder MiniDV in Ubuntu 12.04

How to transfer MiniDV Camcorder footage digitally via Firewire 1394 to your Ubuntu 12.04 computer:

I have a bunch of old (>10 year) MiniDV tapes laying around that I wanted to transfer to my Smugmug account online.  Mainly because I am concerned about losing the content due to decaying magnetic tape and partly because I am organizing the last bit of imagery I have onto the cloud for easy access across all of my devices.

Once upon a time circa Ubuntu 8.04 I was able to plug in the firewire cable into the back of my PC and into my Panasonic MiniDV Camcorder, load Kino, and everything worked.   This time, it wasnt so obvious.

The problem:

• Kino reports "WARNING: raw1394 kernel module not loaded or failure to read/write /dev/raw1394!"
• The newest Firewire driver does not create the raw1394 device node
• Permissions are not setup to allow for general user access on the /dev/fw0 node
• Bug Report here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dvgrab/+bug/779680

The fix:

• Create a link to the newer /dev/fw0 node
• $ sudo ln /dev/fw0 /dev/raw1394
• Run Kino as superuser
• $ gksu kino

Hope this helps someone else out there as it took me a good 3-4 hours of searching the net and trying different drivers to come up with this simple solution.