So sooner or later, I'd imagine nearly everyone here's going to want to copy files between their new GNex and a computer. It's definitely a "Day-1" task for me. I have a lot of stuff on my OG Droid's SD card that I want to copy over to the new GNex.
My workstation is a Linux laptop and so I'm interested in getting this to work smoothly for Linux. Transferring files to and from Windows is a different task for a different thread.
The first thing to be aware of is that ICS does not support USB "Mass Storage" mode, for various reasons covered well elsewhere. So, you can't mount your SD card as a USB drive and access it that way. Instead, ICS support MTP, which is a Microsoft standard.
Most Linux workstations don't have MTP drivers installed out-of-the-box, so I went ahead and installed them and then tried to mount the phone as an MTP resource. I got as far as being able to see the files on my GNex, but I was not able to write to the phone. In fact, when I tried to do that, it seemed to screw up the MTP mount, and then I could not access the phone at all any more.
MTP wasn't playing nicely with my machine so I thought I'd try a different protocol: FTP. I installed SwiFTP, free from the Market, and started an FTP server. I then tried to copy files to the phone with the normal Nautilus file explorer. This would only copy one file and then hang. The file would get there but Nautilus would simply stop copying. I then tried the same thing with FileZilla, which is a dedicated FTP client, and this seems to be working. I don't feel like this is the 'best' way, ICS has MTP built-in and I should not have to resort to another protocol and outflank it.
(TL,DR jump here
So, my best working option so far is: SwiFTP and FileZilla.
I'd really like to know why the MTP drivers don't seem to be working properly, and if anybody has their Linux box connected via MTP, I'd love to hear some pointers on how to get it to work properly.
My workstation is a Linux laptop and so I'm interested in getting this to work smoothly for Linux. Transferring files to and from Windows is a different task for a different thread.
The first thing to be aware of is that ICS does not support USB "Mass Storage" mode, for various reasons covered well elsewhere. So, you can't mount your SD card as a USB drive and access it that way. Instead, ICS support MTP, which is a Microsoft standard.
Most Linux workstations don't have MTP drivers installed out-of-the-box, so I went ahead and installed them and then tried to mount the phone as an MTP resource. I got as far as being able to see the files on my GNex, but I was not able to write to the phone. In fact, when I tried to do that, it seemed to screw up the MTP mount, and then I could not access the phone at all any more.
MTP wasn't playing nicely with my machine so I thought I'd try a different protocol: FTP. I installed SwiFTP, free from the Market, and started an FTP server. I then tried to copy files to the phone with the normal Nautilus file explorer. This would only copy one file and then hang. The file would get there but Nautilus would simply stop copying. I then tried the same thing with FileZilla, which is a dedicated FTP client, and this seems to be working. I don't feel like this is the 'best' way, ICS has MTP built-in and I should not have to resort to another protocol and outflank it.
(TL,DR jump here
So, my best working option so far is: SwiFTP and FileZilla.I'd really like to know why the MTP drivers don't seem to be working properly, and if anybody has their Linux box connected via MTP, I'd love to hear some pointers on how to get it to work properly.
