What is the technical name for "mtp://" urls in Mate Desktop folder explorer (Caja, ex-Nautilus)

[Fernando Cassia]

I'm curious as to what is the technical name given to these
pseudo-URLs used by Caja (formerly Nautilus) on Mate Desktop...

When I plug USB flash drives / Thumb Drives / Pen Drives (use your
naming choice) I get those automagically mounted (automount).

But when I plug my Samsung Android smartphone I get this folder displayed...
mtp://[usb:001,009]/

Containing two pseudo-devices "Phone" and "SD Card".

All looks very nice, except that the devices are NOT mounted as
regular filesystem folders. I can only see them on the GUI through
Caja.

I want to assign the devices some name like /media/myuser/something.

How do I achieve this and what is the logic of mounting these devices
"GUI only" and unaccessible (afaik) from the command line?

I tried "mounting" these pseudo-devices like
mtp://[usb:001,009]/Phone
but BASH knows nothing about "mtp://" devices. This seems to be some
shitty Mate Desktop invention.

On my previous usage of Gnome 2 many moons ago (Sun JDS) this wasn't
the case, I remember USB mass storage devices magically appeared on
the desktop, and that's what I expect here too... but somewhere along
the long fork road, Mate Desktop developers came up with this mtp://
monstrosity.

Any clues? I tried complaining but I don't even know the name of these
damn mtp:// pseudo devices annoyance.

When was this introduced and who thought it was a great idea? I'd like
to know some real (person) names if possible to complain in person
about the hideous nature of this idea...

TIA...
FC

[Dave Stevens]

On Thu, 23 Nov 2017 23:19:47 -0300
Fernando Cassia  wrote:
> I'm curious as to what is the technical name given to these
> pseudo-URLs used by Caja (formerly Nautilus) on Mate Desktop...
>
> When I plug USB flash drives / Thumb Drives / Pen Drives (use your
> naming choice) I get those automagically mounted (automount).
>
> But when I plug my Samsung Android smartphone I get this folder
> displayed... mtp://[usb:001,009]/
>
> Containing two pseudo-devices "Phone" and "SD Card".
>
> All looks very nice, except that the devices are NOT mounted as
> regular filesystem folders. I can only see them on the GUI through
> Caja.
>
> I want to assign the devices some name like /media/myuser/something.
>
> How do I achieve this and what is the logic of mounting these devices
> "GUI only" and unaccessible (afaik) from the command line?
>
> I tried "mounting" these pseudo-devices like
> mtp://[usb:001,009]/Phone
> but BASH knows nothing about "mtp://" devices. This seems to be some
> shitty Mate Desktop invention.
>
> On my previous usage of Gnome 2 many moons ago (Sun JDS) this wasn't
> the case, I remember USB mass storage devices magically appeared on
> the desktop, and that's what I expect here too... but somewhere along
> the long fork road, Mate Desktop developers came up with this mtp://
> monstrosity.

what about this:
https://www.howtogeek.com/192732/android-usb-connections-explained-mtp-ptp-a...

dave
> Any clues? I tried complaining but I don't even know the name of these
> damn mtp:// pseudo devices annoyance.
>
> When was this introduced and who thought it was a great idea? I'd like
> to know some real (person) names if possible to complain in person
> about the hideous nature of this idea...
>
> TIA...
> FC

[Fernando Cassia]

On 11/23/17, Dave Stevens  wrote:
> what about this:
> https://www.howtogeek.com/192732/android-usb-connections-explained-mtp-ptp-a...
>
> dave

Thanks Dave! Media Transfer Protocol huh. Missed that one.

The article is a bit inaccurate on this statement
"because the file system had to be accessible from Windows device, it
had to be formatted with the FAT file system. "

FC

[Fernando Cassia]

On 11/24/17, Fernando Cassia  wrote:
> On 11/23/17, Dave Stevens  wrote:
> > what about this:
> > https://www.howtogeek.com/192732/android-usb-connections-explained-mtp-ptp-a...

This bash script that sets udev rules and automounts mtp devices also
looks promising... (FYI / FWIW / YMMV)

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NicolasBernaerts/ubuntu-scripts/master/and...

Let's see if it's Ubuntu-specific...
FC

[Greg Woods]

On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 7:29 PM, Dave Stevens  wrote:
> what about this:
> https://www.howtogeek.com/192732/android-usb-
> connections-explained-mtp-ptp-and-usb-mass-storage/

Thanks for that. I probably should have guessed some of that myself,
especially the part about needing exclusive access to all of the storage to
prevent data corruption, given my own experiences with high availability
clusters. I had always secretly believed MTP was invented and promoted by
Microsoft to make it hard to access Android devices from Linux :-)  Nice to
see that's not really the case.

But it still begs the question of why I have so much trouble accessing my
Android device files from my Fedora boxes (all running F26). What packages
are needed for this to work? I already have libmtp installed,  but I have
one desktop that I still cannot access my Galaxy S6 phone from. I plug in
the phone, I get the prompt where I click "Allow" to allow the computer to
have access, but nothing ever happens on the Desktop side. (I am running
standard GNOME on the desktop, I have tried it with both Wayland and Xorg,
not that this should matter).

I noticed a package called jmtpfs that looked promising. I installed this
on my Dell laptop, and now it works from there. However, installing jmtpfs
on the problem desktop did not help.

Do others have as much trouble as I do accessing their Android phones from
a Fedora desktop?

--Greg

[Todd Zullinger]

Greg Woods wrote:
> Do others have as much trouble as I do accessing their Android phones from 
> a Fedora desktop?

I never liked using MTP to transfer music to and from my android 
devices.  For years after many Android devices dropped USB mass 
storage access, I simply installed an ssh daemon on the device and 
enabled that when I wanted to send/receive music.

Slowly, it became more of a pain to do this without unlocking the 
device, but then I ran across Termux (https://termux.com/) and it's 
fantasic for this and many other situations.  I much prefer using 
rsync to sync my music from computer to phone and vice versa.

FWIW, I've never found MTP to be capable of syncing large directories.  
It's sometimes alright for small amounts of files, but it's just awful 
when trying to sync a large music collection.  It's both slow as a 
turd compared to rsync and the implementations I've used are buggy as 
hell -- disconnecting or completely failing to sync.

(And no, in case anyone asks, I have not filed any bugs or patches for 
mtp tools in fedora, since I simply prefer to use rsync.)

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Thu, 2017-11-23 at 23:19 -0300, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> On my previous usage of Gnome 2 many moons ago (Sun JDS) this wasn't
> the case, I remember USB mass storage devices magically appeared on
> the desktop, and that's what I expect here too... but somewhere along
> the long fork road, Mate Desktop developers came up with this mtp://
> monstrosity.

It has nothing to do with Mate.
> Any clues? I tried complaining but I don't even know the name of these
> damn mtp:// pseudo devices annoyance.

dnf install simple-mtpfs

poc

[Tim]

Allegedly, on or about 23 November 2017, Fernando Cassia sent:
> All looks very nice, except that the devices are NOT mounted as
> regular filesystem folders. I can only see them on the GUI through
> Caja.

That problems down to the external device not offering a straight-
forward method of access to itself, but using a handling protocol.

You might want to look into:
gvfs-mount (or whatever's superceded it)

I'm not sure if these psuedo-mounts appear elsewhere on the filesystem
tree, without being advertised.  /run/user/$USER/gvfs/ or
/run/user/$UID/gvfs/or ~/run/ perhaps?  And if they do appear there, it
may be a diabolical mess to follow, as the handler that makes it easier
for you isn't being used, through this path.

More info that might be useful:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MTP