Accessing files on android via MTP on Linux

I recently purchased a Motorola MotoX from an AT&T store. Although it is a fabulous piece of hardware, the first trouble i encountered was getting access to files on my fedora 19. The internal memory was not being automatically mounted neither via MTP nor PTP. This was a bit frustrating.

However, the problem can be solved in 15-20 mins with a bunch of yum install commands. One needs to install gMTP and its dependencies which can be found here. Download the source code and extract it. Run ./configure, make and make install. If you encounter errors like 'Package somename was not found', you need to explicitly install it and re-run ./configure. I personally remember installing at least 5-7 dependencies before i got it working.

e.g. yum install fuse-devel libid3tag-devel libmtp-devel libmad-devel fuse fuse-libs libmtp simple-mtpfs glib2-devel

Once done, run gMTP and enable MTP mode on your android phone. You should now see the files listed in the gMTP window as shown below

Adjusting to Mandriva Linux

I did a clean install of Mandriva Linux (i586) powerpack 2008 yesterday on a separate 25GB partition (ext3 formatted), thereby dual booting with Windows Vista Home Premium.

One of the early problems i faced was regarding writing data on NTFS formatted drives (i had 3 of them!). Thankfully Linux programmers have written out a library known as ntfs-3g to enable write support on the Linux kernel. Fetch the ntfs-3g through "Mandriva Linux Control Center", unmount the NTFS drive through disk drake, switch to "Expert mode", change the type of the drive to "NTFS-3G", uncheck ro (read-only) from options, and re-mount the drive for the changes to take place.





The same thing can be done through "Configuration Editor".


Second thing was getting my windows applications to run so that i dont feel like i'm in a no-man's land :)

The default "Software Management" tool was useful in itself but it is not a complete solution. I fetched software info's as well as their main updates from Online Repositories through Konsole. A useful website for this job is :- http://easyurpmi.zarb.org






The links to the repositories (which are infact Konsole commands) are provided by selecting the appropriate linux, its version as well as its architecture.

To integrate those repositories into the "Software Management", the Konsole commands have to be executed as root.





Next, i updated my system via "Mandriva Control Center". I had around a 1100 updates (now that figure seems a little big for my 256Kbps connection :) ). After the updation process is complete, switch back to "Software management". Applications are now updated and new ones are added.



After doing this much, i felt somewhere near to being @ my home.


The one thing that surprised me in linux was its Konsole being case sensitive, as it is seen here while i was trying to install Nvidia Drivers for my 6200TC:-




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