Work has provided me with a new handheld computer, a Galaxy S4, made by Samsung. It runs Android 4.3 plus whatever unspeakable horrors Samsung and Verizon have inflicted upon it. There's a microSD flash memory card mounted inside, and I'd like to be able to copy files to and from it, from my Linux home desktop. This is proving unreasonably hard.
Aside from coping general documents, photos, etc., back and forth, I have a large collection of MP3 files on my desktop that I want to keep in sync on my handheld -- adds, changes, *and* deletes. rsync does a fine job of this on a filesystem. My previous handhelds let me plug in the USB cable and access the mem card as a USB Mass Storage Class (MSC) device. In other words, like a disk drive. Block device appeared, I mounted it, I did filesystem things, I unmounted it, done. Apparently that's not an option for this device. Difficulty: I can't root the device. Corporate policy. Whatever I do has to play by the rules. Apps are generally OK, but not apps that attempt to circumvent security mechanisms. It appears the Galaxy really wants to speak MTP (Media Transfer Protocol). I've been playing with MTP stuff on Linux. My desktop is running Debian 7.4 "wheezy", kernel 3.2.0-4 package version 3.2.54-2. There's some issue that causes libmtp to hang for 20-30 seconds whenever it opens the device. That's maddeningly irritating at best. If you're wanting to run a bunch of commands in sequence, it's basically a showstopper. I've played around with the mtp-tools package from Debian (package version 1.1.3-35-g0ece104-5). It lacks a command to create directories. It can't transfer more than one file at a time (see "showstopper", above). The commands lack any documentation or help. I think they're actually just example skeletons from the libmtp sources that were packaged up and passed off as utilities. :-p I tried the mtpfs FUSE filesystem (1.1, built from source). I found it couldn't create directories. That's a problem if I want to replicate a directory tree (see MP3 collection, above). I tried gmtp (pkg ver 1.3.3-1). It suffers from the libmtp hang issue, but at least once it's connects is responsive. It can create directories. But it can only transfer files in one directory at a time. (Ibid.) I could, of course, take the mem card out of the handheld, plug it into my desktop's card reader, and do the I/O that way. Problem there is, I've got a fancy sealed protective case for the handheld. Opening it repeatedly is bad for it. And annoying. And exposes the handheld to damage. I've seen some suggestions of using "cloud" storage, like Dropbox or Google Music, etc. It seems silly to have to send many gigabytes out my netfeed only to have to immediately download it again, on the same feed, just to copy between devices which are six inches apart and connected via USB cable. Anyone got a better idea? Bluetooth? Wifi? Floppy disk? -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
