The Samsung Galaxy Nexus is a great piece of hardware and software but when it comes to accessing the contents of the device there seems to be some problems especially if you don’t use Windows bases operating systems. Since the Galaxy Nexus uses Media Transfer Protocol or MTP for short, works alot different from UMS or Universal Mass Storage that Android devices commonly use besides the Nexus S variants. What does this mean to the end user? Well you can copy files without having to mount and dismount the device which is probably all it’s good for but with UMS it gave the end user an actual device block to access which means that most operating system’s out of the box did not need to install anything else to access the information.
Shannon Vanwagner has an awesome post on his blog with step by step directions on how to access the Galaxy Nexus on Ubuntu-11.10, the most important part of his post besides what commands to use and what packages you will need is that someone from Google named Paul Eubanks told Shannon after his complaint on accessing his Galaxy Nexus on Google+, Paul told Shannon to update libmtp. After everything was said and done Shannon got everything working.
I had permission errors even thou the user that mounted the device had rw support according to mount, so if you’re running Gentoo and own a Galaxy Nexus and have random permissions denied errors when trying to write a folder to the G-Nexus is to:
- Make sure libmtp is up to at least verison 1.1.1
- If you’re running libmtp-1.1.1 already, emerge sync and re-emerge libmtp
After I re-emerged libmtp-1.1.1 I was able to create directories inside other directories, granted there are still some hiccups but since Microsoft created this protcol I’m not really surprised and with time I’m sure libmtp will be fine.