[clug] Persuading Debian to talk to an Android tablet via USB?

[Daniel Pittman]

Felix Karpfen <felix.karpfen at gmail.com> writes:

> I have purchased an Android tablet (a Chinese copy of the Eken M001) and
> successfully installed FBReader onto it.  This has achieved almost
> everything that I wanted from my purchase. I can now download books from the
> Internet directly onto the tablet's SD-card and the FBReader is set up to
> find them there.
>
> I had hoped that I could copy my already-downloaded books from my computer
> to the SD_card.  So far, I have failed.  I suspect that the instructions for
> connecting the tablet to a computer (via an USB cable) presume that my
> computer is running an MS operating system.  In fact, it is running Debian
> (Lenny).
>
> Is it a lost cause?

Almost certainly not; it should "just work", *but* you need to instruct
Android to mount the SD card as a mass storage device over USB rather than use
it locally.[1]

You can't do internal storage that way, though, only the SD card.

In the phone version this shows up in the notification area when you connect a
computer: you plug in the cable, open notifications, tap the option for
mounting the device to the computer, and you are done.

Android uses a FAT32 filesystem on the card for storage, nothing special.


If none of that works, you might try getting one of the servers running: there
are WebDAV, FTP, and even "USB Mass Storage" servers available on the Android
marketplace — though I can't recommend any because I don't use them myself.

        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  ...which also means it can't be used to run software from, or otherwise
     accessed at the same time the server is.

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