rockstarmode

Samsung Android MTP devices on Fedora 15

I'm lucky enough to have recently picked up a Samsung Galaxy 10.1 tablet running Android 3.1. The tablet itself is pretty impressive but uses a protocol I'm unfamiliar with to connect to other computers as a mass storage device. Since the tablet doesn't have a removable SD card (which is kind of strange) Google decided to build the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) into the device. MTP is great because it allows the tablet and your computer to read/write to the tablet filesystem without Android having to unmount the tablet filesystem first. This means that your Android apps that require the storage area to be mounted won't be killed when you put the device into mass storage mode. This technology apparently can also be referred to as "PlaysForSure" which is a Microsoft brainchild.

This new awesome doesn't come without a few growing pains though. To mount the filesystem on a fully updated Fedora 15 computer you must go into the Android Settings area and select "Applications > Development" and make sure that "USB debugging" is unchecked. On my tablet this box was checked by default (it is a retail device, not the Google I/O edition). After disabling debugging it can simply be plugged into the computer via the included USB cable. If a file manager window doesn't pop up asking what you'd like to do please make sure you have the fuse and libmtp packages installed (they should be by default).

Unfortunately this is where I ran into another bug, check out this screenshot:

Every folder in the root level of the device is listed as empty! A quick read around the intertubes leads me to believe that MTP does some sort of file translation based on file extensions. This is odd since Android is basically Linux and OSS operating systems have pretty much moved away from file extensions being the sole determinator of file type. I'm at a loss for where to report this bug as it could be present in MTP itself (perhaps as a weird Microsoft-y "feature"), in the libmtp implementation or in the Gnome file manager. However copying files to the device worked as promised, even though they disappeared from the file manager listing on a subsequent connection to the Fedora machine. This could possibly be related to file ownership or permissions.

One more thing to note: it's annoying that the only way to initialize an MTP connection on the tablet is to physically unplug the USB cable and plug it in again. It would be nice if you could enable this from the tablet interface sort of how other Android devices handle the mass storage mode.

For those of us that may want to compile mtpfs for fuse manually (as of version 0.9 this didn't change anything) the source code can be found here. Fedora users will probably have to install some development packages to successfully compile:

yum install fuse-devel libid3tag-devel libmtp-devel libmad-devel

Getting Tor onion routing + Chrome working

*** EDIT *** I used Google Chrome version 6.0.453.1 dev from their official yum repository, YMMV

I spent about an hour figuring this out tonight so I figured I'd send it along.  Up until now I've never really gotten the combo of Tor, a browser and a proxy working to my liking.  This is how I did it:

Fedora 12 preupgrade issues

If you are having issues with upgrading Fedora from 11 to 12 with error messages saying that your /boot partition is full *and* this walkthrough doesn't help I may have a solution for you:

1. Boot into your Fedora 11 kernel
2. remount /boot as read write (mount -o remount rw /boot)
3. move the file /boot/upgrade/install.img to unencrypted storage, I used a USB key
4. Reboot into the Fedora 12 upgrade kernel, when it errors out with a message claiming it can't find the installation image point it at the place you moved the install.img file to. 
5. Have a beer, the upgrade takes awhlie

The walkthrough on Fedora Project was for people preparing to upgrade, I however was stuck halfway though an upgrade so their solutions didn't help me.

a2dp on Fedora 11 and Pulseaudio

*** UPDATE *** Fedora 12 has this same issue, this isn't surprising as this is likely going to be solved by the PulseAudio people

Earlier today I kind of got bluetooth audio (a2dp) working with Pulseaudio on Fedora 11, the solution can be found here. As that solution involved using a .asoundrc file with an ALSA device I was less than enthused.

A little research and a helpful push in the right direction and I figured out how to use the new-ish pulseaudio 'module-bluetooth-device'. To get this working in Fedora 11 without using ALSA:

1. Make sure you have the pulseaudio bluetooth package installed (yum install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth)
2. Download the attached perl script and mark it executable.
3. Pair your bluetooth device with your computer. Have it remember the PIN, etc.. 
4. Open a terminal and run the perl script 
5. When the script prompts you to connect the device use the bluetooth applet, command line, whatever you use to get hcitool to connect. Hit <enter>. 
6. The script will attempt to unload modules that interfere with getting a2dp working. 
7. Try to play something with sound. If you see the bluetooth device in pavucontrol under "Output Devices" but still don't have sound try setting your "Internal Audio" profile to "Off"

The details:

I was attempting to use the Dell BH200 headset that comes with some of the laptops in their XPS line. The headset paired and connected without any issues but refused to show up under "Output Devices" in pavucontrol. I learned that pulseaudio bluetooth support wasn't installed by default on all Fedora 11 machines so I went yummed the correct package. After uncommenting the 'module-bluetooth-discover' module in
/etc/pulse/default.pa stuff was still broken, just differently.

It turns out that the pulse people prefer to default devices to the HSP/HFP profile which is used for monaural telephone conversations. For some reason when pulse sees that my headphones are A2DP capable it tries to change profiles and ends up just disconnecting them instead. When I connected the bluetooth device it would show up under "Output Devices" but disappear after a few seconds, no sound would work in the interim. Catching it and changing the profile before it had a chance to error out didn't help.

I guess the bluetooth-device module works just fine if you tell it exactly what you want (A2DP), and that the 'discover' module was the culprit. My script just unloads the discover module long enough for the user to connect the device and then sets the correct profile before exiting.

I'm not sure why the pulse people have things set up this way and I'm not sure why Fedora hasn't made this automagic. Hopefully this script will be helpful to someone else.

Click here to download:

bh200-a2dp.pl (2 KB)