MTP Support in Fedora

[Dave Cross]

On 22 September 2012 15:04, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2012-09-22 at 14:45 +0100, Dave Cross wrote:
>> I can't be the only person with this problem.
>>
>> 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. I have libmtp installed and up to
>> date. When I plug in the Nexus, both RhythmBox sees it and claim to
>> display the music found on it. But it doesn't find the MP3s I've
>> downloaded using the Amazon MP3 application. Banshee doesn't detect
>> the Nexus at all.
>>
>> I've seen talk of something called "mtpfs", but that doesn't seem to
>> be available from the Fedora repos. Another app called gMTP sounds
>> like it might be useful, but is also not available for Fedora.
>>
>> Has anyone else found a way round this problem? Is anyone packaging
>> mtpfs or gMTP for Fedora?
>
> This has been asked a couple of times here. I haven't had much luck with
> mtpfs either (I just compiled it from source). Clearly a properly
> working libmtp is what is needed and unfortunately I don't see any
> mention of such a thing in the F18 Proposed Features list.

Yeah. I tried that and had no success either.

> However a workaround for many use cases is to install an FTP or sftp
> server on the device - there are several in the Play store - and either
> use a basic FTP client from Linux or just mount the server from Nautilus
> and use drag-and-drop. Be careful though. Doing this with a large group
> of files at once seems to give random dropouts.
>
> Very recently I started using Airdroid on my GNexus phone under Jelly
> Bean. It's basically a specialized website running on the phone and
> talking over Wifi, with file transfers plus some other features. We'll
> see how it works out.

Approaches like this sound good, but they're hampered by a recent
router firmware upgrade which renders the devices on my home network
completely unable to see each other.

I guess there's always Bluetooth :-/

Cheers,

Dave...

-- 
Dave Cross :: dave at dave.org.uk
http://dave.org.uk/
@davorg