In October 2011, with the writing on the wall after Nokia switched to Windows Phone and closed the long-running MeeGo project, several former Maemo Nokians left the company ("Nokia was a coward"). With support from their old employer through the Nokia Bridge program, but without any access to Nokia's intellectual property or patents, the new company - called Jolla - continued the work that spawned the legendary N9, only able to use the open source parts of that phone's software.
Late 2013, their work culminated in Sailfish, running on their own smartphone, the Jolla. In a way, this device and its software has been in the making since 2004-2005, and considering the rocky roads and many challenges these people had to overcome between then and now, the phone sometimes seems to radiate defiance and determination.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2010-06-08
Member since:2007-01-18
There are several Linux solutions for dealing with MTP (the Arch wiki currently has 8 different solutions listed on its MTP page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mtp ), but unfortunately, my experience with them all with my Galaxy S4 was quite poor. They kept dropping the connection, and for some reason, they kept connecting to the wrong drive (I'd tell them to connect to the external SD card, and they'd claim that they did, but they were actually interacting with the internal SD card), thought maybe that's an issue specific to my phone.
In the end, I found it much easier to install an FTP server on my phone than deal with MTP (since unlike MTP, it actually worked), but my final solution was to use bittorrent sync so that I could manipulate files on my desktop and have the ones on the phone update automatically (not to mention, you get a backup of the phone's data that way).
So, while it might have something to do with my specific phone, I have nothing but bad things to say about MTP, and I sorely miss how I could mount my phone as a USB drive on older versions of Android. Though bittorrent sync is a pretty cool solution, since it allows me to manipulate files on my desktop without even plugging my phone into anything.
Member since:2010-06-08
Member since:
2005-06-29
Linux has had MTP support via libmtp for a while now. I've used it on Arch, Slackware, and Debian. I think the GNOME DE supports it natively too.
One drawback to MTP versus USB mass storage is that you can only perform one file operation at a time. You can queue them, but don't expect fast, parallel transfers.