[ale] Things I have learned about the HTC One m8

[Phil Turmel]

On 07/04/2014 05:40 PM, Charles Shapiro wrote:
> Interesting.  Thanks for the information.  My computers don't support MTP,
> so I am still exploring options here.  I did get  my contacts and passwords
> transferred,  so I'm out of immediate trouble anyways.
> On Jul 4, 2014 5:25 PM, "Alex Carver" <agcarver+ale at acarver.net> wrote:
> 
>> On 2014-07-04 13:51, Charles Shapiro wrote:
>>
>>> Android 4.4 apparently has disabled USB mass storage to the phone in
>> favor
>>> of Microsoft's evil MTP protocol (
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol ), designed mainly
>> to
>>> facilitate DRM controls on your devices.  There may be a way around this.
>>> Linux MTP drivers are apparently buggy and troublesome. I need to do
>>> further research.
>>
>> USB mass storage has been gone since Android Honeycomb (3.0).  UMS
>> doesn't support file systems greater than 4GB (which is pretty much all
>> phones after that point) and UMS didn't work well with Anroid 4.0's
>> unified file system (single partition rather than dual partitions).  So
>> they switched to MTP/PTP.

My KDE desktop offers to mount MTP devices, and usually will display the
directory structure, but then chokes when transferring files.  I looked
into the issue and found that it is a known problem with most phones'
MTP implementation that limits them to a single session at a time.
libmtpfs is multi-threaded and multi-client and doesn't (yet?) have a
way to serialize multiple connections.

I work around the problem by using go-mtfs, a google rewrite of the
standand mtpfs FUSE filesystem.  I haven't bothered to script the mount
and unmount operations, but it otherwise works great.

HTH,

Phil