Making Linux and Android Get Along | Hacker News Reader

Making Linux and Android Get Along

linuxjournal.com

36 pointsxtraclass16 comments

This is a list of apps to handle file and data transfers between 2 computing devices. All of these suggestions will work fine with Windows or Apple desktops, and most of them will also work on iPhones.

Yes, there are 12 at least ways of moving data from one storage device, through the host OS, across a physical (or wifi) connection or 2, sometimes through the cloud, another physical link, to the target OS and onto its storage device.

Air droid. It starts a little webserver on your phone, and lets you do everything from your computer. Copy files, and move things around, as well as manage contacts or even SMS people while typing on the keyboard. I like it.

AirDroid is a _very_ nice piece of software.

I use Wifi File Transfer: http://www.smarterdroid.com/index.php/wifi-file-transfer/usi...

Which just runs a tiny web server on the tablet/phone and then I can upload/download from my browser.

But Android is using the Linux kernel. Surely they get along already.

If you had RTFA, you'd know that by "get along" the author really meant, share/synchronize data between your Android device and PC.

TL;DR Before Android 3.0, you could just plug your device in and use USB Mass Storage. After Android 3.0, to share data with your Linux PC, you have to install MTP protocol or use a cloud storage service like dropbox.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/12/how-to-connect-your-andro...

That using multiple computers that you own together in a coherent manner without needing weird 3rd party software and services is still an issue for regular people is one of the things that tells me that we are not living in the best possible world of tech.

I don't really see any reason why some of the higher level concepts from Plan 9 that solved this problem should not have take off by now. Alas that is not the case.

I wasnt aware of this android 'feature' since I am still stuck on android 2.3 on my Verizon Droid Charge. Interestingly I always pointed out the fact that you could just plug in an android device as a usb mass storage as the example of how google gets it. Not looking forward to my phone upgrade now. Also I dont know if it was a broken implementation but using MTP on the Creative Zii devkit was an exercise in frustration.

Andoroid 4.1 supports USB mass storage, at least on the devices I've used. I think it does have to be enabled in the settings though.

Android 4.x supports it, but I think the phone hardware has to also support it somehow. As far as I know there is no way to get a galaxy nexus or a nexus 7 into usb mass storage mode.

The issue is that new devices don't have filesystems that can be exported over USB mass storage. Instead of having a small data partition and big FAT32 external storage partition, they have a single bigger data partition with a media storage directory.

The data partition is ext4, so can't be mounted by most operating systems. It is also shared between apps, app data, and media storage so it can't be exported while in use.

Mass storage doesn't work on a device like the Galaxy Nexus that emulates the "SD card" on its internal storage, because it requires making the blocks of the underlying device available to the host OS.

IMO it's worth it to avoid that awful old chestnut where you'd run out of internal space with heaps left on the card, but unfortunately MTP isn't quite as convenient :(

A summary of the article is pre-android phones assumed you use windows on the desktop therefore the only way to move files onto the phone was some clunky buggy proprietary (but I repeat myself...).

So use dropbox on the phone and linux desktop (yes) or something called "box" that is just like dropbox but has a different name or google drive on the phone and drive in the browser.

Article also talked about a bunch of different options like spideroak, and connectbot SSH (or was it sshdroid? well, either way..)

Foldersync is entertaining, I played with that a year or two ago although the article only talks about some complicated webdav arrangement, it supports most any protocol. It costs money, as I recall.

Finally the article explains USB connection was too complicated for the author to get it to work, although the few times I tried it, it worked fine for me.

On a personal note out of 3 android devices on my desk only 1 does not have a memory card. So most of the time I just pull the card and copy stuff to it. I donno if android and memory cards no longer mix, or what. Also if we allow "cloud based" I often upload stuff to evernote and access it from android. Ditto the google play, where the author went to great effort to transfer some mp3s when he could have just uploaded them to google play music using the linux desktop client. Or I just simply download stuff on the android device from the net or a machine I control.

Some things take two steps. The simplest way to upload something like a .mobi file of a pragmatic programmer magazine into the kindle reader, seems to be to stick the .mobi on dropbox and then export it to kindle from the dropbox, as I recall.

The article seemed to avoid "wifi file server" (name of app, I believe) which basically runs a non-daemon ftp server and the screen spits out the URL and password for people to access. I've copied gigs of stuff using that. My biggest annoyance is not being able to force a set password / password rolls to a new one every 5 minutes or whatever, which is unholy annoying if you're doing 2 hours of work and need to reauth dozens of times.

Could someone please explain what problems MTP is designed to solve?

The problem of getting away from FAT (for Windows compatibility) and file permissions/accessibility with multiple users.

I wish there was sth like : Making Mac and Android Get Along. This is required. As of now we have got poor iTunes sync using doubleTwist and a buggy app from Google that lets me copy files to my Android via USB and adds itself to system startup every time it's started.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com