MTP Support in Fedora

[James Wilkinson]

Dave Cross wrote:
> I can't be the only person with this problem.

No, you aren’t.

> I have a Nexus 7. The Nexus runs Android Jellybean. Recent versions of
> Android (like Jellybean) have removed support for USB mass storage and
> the Nexus now connect to my Fedora 17 desktop using MTP.
> 
> This seems to be a problem as MTP support in Fedora (perhaps in Linux
> in general) appears to be appalling.

This is a Known Problem.

There was a post recently on the devel list
(http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2012-September/171639.html)
where the Fedora maintainer of mtpfs announced he was abandoning the
package for various reasons (like “It’s buggy” and “Upstream is not
responsive”), and suggested either go-mtpfs or jmptfs
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=841260#c1).

You might find the next comment behind that link relevant: not having a
suitable device, I can’t comment.

Incidentally, I understand that Android hasn’t removed support for USB
mass storage: it’s just that many recent devices come without support
for SD cards, so there’s nothing to export as USB mass storage. This
means the Android device *and* the computer can both access the shared
data at the same time, there aren’t any problems with jolts causing
momentary disconnects of the SD card, and it gives the designers more
freedom, especially with phones that have sealed-in batteries (so no
battery cover to hide the SD card).

More cynically, this gives phone manufacturers and networks a greater
share of the price of a phone with 8 GB or 16 GB of storage, gives them
a convenient way of providing a “premium” device with more capacity (at
a premium, of course), and means they don’t have to worry about
Microsoft’s FAT and exFAT patents. 

James.

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