Problems mounting a cell phone

[Nathan Dorfman]

On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
> On Sun, 2014-11-09 at 09:15 -0800, MR ZenWiz wrote:
>> I have a Casio C811 G-zone cell phone
>> [...]
>> When I plug it in to the USB port, it shows up in lsusb as an NEC
>> device, but the file system never mounts and I can't seem to access it
>> as a /dev device.
>> The phone has version 4.12 of Android, if that's any help.

[...]

> - on the pulled down panel, there should be a USB control to tell the
> phone to make its memory available as a USB mass storage device. On mine
> it says "USB connected: Select to copy files to from your computer"

Android hasn't supported USB mass storage in years -- since version
2.3 AFAIK. Currently it speaks something called MTP... I don't know
how it works in Xubuntu, but in regular Ubuntu it also doesn't show up
as a mountpoint, but is available via gvfs:

1. it should appear in Nautilus under the name of the device or just
'Android Phone'

2. Colin Law recently and most helpfully pointed out to me that while
not having its own mount point, it is actually readily available for
any program under /run/user/$(id -u)/gvfs. Each device will have its
own unique subdirectory there, starting with mtp.

There are also two FUSE-based packages mtpfs and jmtpfs in apt, but
unfortunately I can tell you those have never worked for me.

-nd.