[Technology] Update on Fedora Linux and MTP support

I use a Galaxy Nexus as my primary camera.  I love that it instantly uploads images to G+ for easy sharing.  However, I still like to keep copies on my local machine.



Linux support for MTP with Android on the Galaxy Nexus has gotten better but is still almost unusable.  Last year when I tried, I could not reliably navigate directories. Today, Nautilus was able to successfully navigate directories, and was able to thumbnail images in /sdcard/DCIM/Camera without blocking!  However, when I tried to cut and paste files onto my local hard drive, it would copy a few but then block interminably and I'd have to unplug the device.  I didn't lose any photos doing this, though.  (Hooray for software that copies first and then unlinks the source file.)  It was also very slow, with the transfer occurring at about 114kB/s on average.



I checked whether PTP worked any better than last year.  Last year, it worked better than MTP, but still had issues.  This time, I was able to initiate transfers at quite a fast speed, but invariably after about ten or so photos were copied, it too would stall.  Unlike with MTP, nautilus itself did not freeze.  I could re-initiate a cut-and-paste, but that would stall too.



So, for now, it's almost usable, but I'm still going to use the Android debugger (adb), as I mentioned last year.



Synopsis:

sudo adb start-server # after getting adb from android-sdk-linux/platform-tools

adb pull /sdcard/DCIM/photos/ ~/newpictures/

adb shell   # so I can delete them from the phone after import