Detecting smartphones

[kitjackson]

Debian Wheezy + XFCE

What's the program or service that detects and displays USB devices? If I plug a memory stick into a USB port it is recognised and displayed on the desktop for easy mounting. If I plug an Android smartphone into a USB port and turn on USB storage on the phone then the phone and its storage isn't shown on the desktop. This used to work some time ago so that the storage on the Smartphone was displayed in the same way a USB memory stick is.

I've recently uprgraded to the latest Wheezy with
sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade.

Has anything changed recenly that is preventing the smartphone being shown on the desktop or have I accidently deleted something?

lsusb shows
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 12d1:2350 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
amongst the devices so Wheezy knows that the smartphone is there.

Does anyone know what service tries to identify if a device has mountable storage?

[Head_on_a_Stick]

https://wiki.debian.org/mtp

[kitjackson]

Hi, thanks for your suggestion.

There's something wrong here though. I get

[code
~$ mtp-detect
Unable to open ~/.mtpz-data for reading, MTPZ disabled.
libmtp version: 1.1.8

Listing raw device(s)
No raw devices found.

but dmesg shows

[ 8236.629615] usb 2-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[ 8236.760222] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=12d1, idProduct=2350
[ 8236.760227] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=4
[ 8236.760230] usb 2-1: Product: HUAWEI Y221 PHONE
[ 8236.760232] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: MediaTek
[ 8236.760235] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: CEB6IRUOCQOJUC59
[ 8236.762234] usb-storage 2-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[ 8236.762633] scsi5 : usb-storage 2-1:1.0
[/code]

Do you know if something has changed in support for smartphones between Debian 7 and Debian 8? The phone is running Android 4.4 and I used to be able to access its storage by just plugging the phone into a USB port and tapping on 'Turn on USB storage' on the phone which resulted in an icon appearing on the desktop in XFCE to represent the phone's storage. I had to install mtp-tools, it wasn't installed by default in Debian 8.. That's why I was asking if anybody knew which package used to be included in Debian 7. Do you know what it was?

[GarryRicketson]

I can confirm something changed, and it is not just XFCE, nor "smartphones".
On that I don't know, mine does say it is android 4.4.2, if that means it is a "smartphone"
then it is but, any way,
After upgradeing my Debian Wheezy recently, to 7.11 , I am no longer
able to access its storage either, I use "mate", but any way, before I did
the upgrade I could. I have not tried on Debian 8.
For me ,it is not a big deal, I very rarely need to access the storage, but if I do
need to, I just re-boot, and boot with a older version of MX-14, and with that
I have no problem accessing, for example if I want to transfer any photos to
the computer, that is what I do.
I do not know, what changed, but it is very obvious something did change
after the upgrade, in fact I am really regretting that I did the upgrade , because
this is not the only thing that has changed, and not for the better. But I suppose
that is another topic,...in any event, now I know, and will not be doing any upgrades
on my laptop, it is still Debian 7.6 , and works fine. (this is my desktop ). So that is
why I am following this thread, ......
The MX-14 version, is based on Debian Wheezy, I have not upgraded it either, for
quite some time,...not sure if I want to experiment with that either, since it works
just fine as it is.

[pylkko]

this may be just my opinion, but since most phones can do wlan with 100-600 mbps, it just doesn't make sense to use a cable to move files from a phone to a computer.

[Ardouos]

I tend to use samba to transfer data from my phone to my PC and via versa, works wonders and more convenient.

[sunrat]

this may be just my opinion, but since most phones can do wlan with 100-600 mbps, it just doesn't make sense to use a cable to move files from a phone to a computer.

Of course there's an app for that, and it works well -

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... wifi&hl=en

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I use https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/? ... wiftp_free

It's GPL'd

[stevepusser]

Were you using that Android 4.4 smartphone with an older Debian successfully, or are you just remembering how an older phone used to work? As far as I know, with Android 4.2 or something, Google dropped the standard old MSC USB (flash drive) interface in favor of only having the mtp one, for some technical memory-related reason. (Try a web-search about the problems in Linux) The libmtp9 1.1.3 in Wheezy may be too old to support your phone--it has an internal list of supported devices--but you could try the 1.1.8 in wheezy-backports, or one of the even newer backports in the MX 14 repositories. I also sorta remember we had to get a customized gvfs for xfce4 to see the newer Android devices, so again, you might try the MX 14 version if it still won't work in Wheezy.

[kitjackson]

OK, I've done a bit more work on this. I've dug out an old computer and done a fresh install of Debian 7.6 + XFCE. Plug in the phone running Android 4.4.2 and click the 'Turn on USB storage' on the phone and little icons appears on the XFCE desktop representing the internal storage on the phone and the SD card. Thunar sees them as oridinary filesystems.

On this machine running Debian 8.1 + XFCE I get nothing so the problem is at the Debian end. So does anybody know what packages were included in 7.6 that aren't included in 8.1? Or is it worse? Has whatever package is used to provide the functionality had a rewrite and the old code removed so there's now no hope of getting the old behaviour back?

Better still does anybody know how I can go about finding out for myself what packages are called when a USB device in inserted? I've afraid I don't know where to begin looking.

[sunrat]

Compare the udev rules in both systems to see if your phone is listed. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Udev

As mentioned above, support for USB Mass Storage was dropped in Android (after ICS IIRC). Check your new Debian has udev rules for your phone, and if still unsuccessful focus on getting MTP working.

[debiman]

On this machine running Debian 8.1 + XFCE I get nothing so the problem is at the Debian end.

that does not necessarily follow.
be that as it may, what exact phone model (and android version) are you actually trying to connect?