Hacker News Reader

Comment by dddddannyyyyy | Hacker News Reader

You need MTP stuff -- mtp-tools. The newest Amarok or Rhythmbox w/ plugin should work fine.

The Nexus unified the filesystem, and therefore cant give USB block-level access. MTP was the only way to go unless you want to have a separate partition, which leads to the terrible 'is the app on local or on sd?' situation.

Here is the situation described: http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/11/19/galaxy.nexus.f...

For mac users, you want this tool: http://www.android.com/filetransfer/

After having the Galaxy Nexus for 2 weeks, the phone no longer feels large in my hands, but the Nexus S it replaced looks ancient and pathetically tiny/low-resolution.

View on HN

I'm one of the bought-it-just-this-morning crowd, so I'm doing the "MTP, WTF?" dance with everyone else. For the record, for folks who don't yet know: ICS has dumped the idea of managing the internal storage as a FAT32 filesystem that can be mounted on the USB host. Instead, it stores it internally in ext4 and uses the Media Transfer Protocol to export it over USB.

I found this gadget, which is a fuse wrapper around libmtp: http://www.adebenham.com/mtpfs/

It's not packaged (though libmtp is on fedora 16 at least), but is trivially buildable and installs just a single binary. Then "mtpfs /local/mount/dir" will mount your phone's /data partition for you. Much cleaner than trying to sync via a media player IMHO.

What I have seen on reviews is that this is not an ICS issue, but rather because the Galaxy Nexus doesn't include a SD card. Which can be a good thing.

The article you linked to explains that in the fourth paragraph. Their reasoning is that they don't want people to need a file manager in Android. It makes since to me.I like that they are going to a one large internal storage location.

It's neither really. The reason is that the data filesystem used to be FAT, so that it could easily be read by host computers using the preexisting USB Storage standard. But FAT sucks (for reasons too numerous to list here), so they went with ext4. But that can't be mounted on anything but a linux box, so they had to pick a new file exchange mechanism. It could have been something like SMB over a USB CDC network device (phones have done that in the past) but they picked MTP instead.

I have all the MTP libs. There are bug reports out there regarding the fact that Banshee can't detect the phone. I also manually set up mounting the device through FUSE, but without the developer tools activated it won't mount.

Something weird is going on here, and it's likely a problem with MTP handling in Ubuntu. I've never had this trouble with other MTP devices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com