Home / ubuntu / Questions / 1047359
In Process
Jasper
Asked: 2018-06-18 05:37:01 +0800 CST

Mounting a mobile phone: what is happening under the hood?

  • 772

I'm using Ubuntu 17.10 and it automatically mounts my mobile phone (Android, Xperia Z5 Compact) when I connect it via USB. This only happens under Unity that I normally don't use.

What's the magic that is actually happening so that I can "mount" the phone with my favorite window manager spectrwm?

unity automount

1 Answers

  1. gio is doing the "hard work".

    To mount an MTP device, you can do the following steps:

    1. Connect device, select "Transfer Files" or something similar on the phone.
    2. gio mount -li | grep unix-device and look for /dev/bus/usb/.... If you have several hits, remove the grep ... part and try again to find out which device is the phone.
    3. gio mount -d /dev/bus/usb/... with the full path after unix-device from step 2.
    4. The device's storage will be available at /run/user/1000/gvfs/mtp:host=... where 1000 is your user ID and may vary and the path ends with the string that can be found in gio mount -li's output after activation_root.
    • 1