Accessing a Samsung galaxy mini from Fedora 20 via USB.

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 7, 2014, at 7:01 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Haven't used F20 so far, but note that Android 4 devices don't export a storage interface, i.e. they can't be treated as external disks.

Technically they do export a storage interface, by default via MTP, optionally as PTP. Or neither, in which case I have no access at all.

What you mean is that Android devices don't present themselves as a block device, i.e. we don't have access to either logical or physical sectors, therefore we can't load a partition table or even find file system superblocks. It's kinda like only being able to mount a share via NFS, rather than as iSCSI.

> You must use MTP to access them which is what simple-mtfs does. I've used it successfully on F19.

Right, this is built into Gnome. I just connected my 2 year old Galaxy Nexus running 4.3.1, and it automounts the Galaxy Nexus device with an Internal Storage icon that I can navigate. mount shows:

fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw,relatime)
gvfsd-fuse on /run/user/1000/gvfs type fuse.gvfsd-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1000)

So to access storage from command line you'd need to figure out how to use MTP via fusectl, I'm not sure it's done with the mount command, never tried it.


Chris Murphy