Re: [gentoo-user] Accessing a Samsung phone and it's data.

[Raffaele Belardi]

Dale wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> I've mentioned before that I used a Motorola Razr cell phone, ancient as
> it is.  Well, the USB port wore out and it was hard to get it to charge
> up the battery.  Finally, I got tired of having to fiddle with it to get
> it to charge so I bought a Samsung Galaxy J2, Dash version.  Up under
> the battery it says J260A.  I did some googling and found some software
> that says it will allow me to access the data on it.  I'm mostly wanting
> to access the SD card but would also like to be able to access other
> things such as contacts, calendar etc.  This is what I installed:
> sys-fs/android-file-transfer-linux  While I can access some things, it
> seems not to list anything useful.  Most directories are empty which is
> sort of hard to believe.
>
> Is there other software that I can't find that allows this to be done?
> GUI would be nice but I suspect if I can figure out what to use, a
> regular file manager will be used.

On Gnome desktop I think I just had to add 'mtp' to the USE flags [1] and rebuild. Now 
when I connect the phone the file manager pops up automatically and I can read/write the 
'user' part of the Flash memory.

Note that I use the Gnome file manager only to transfer photos or side-loaded [2] apps. 
Whenever I tried to access apps data I found it hard or impossible to locate them. Looks 
like Android provides standard places to store things but apps developers are not forced 
to use them and in practice everyone does what they want, possibly using directories not 
accessible to normal users. I have the impression that to really be able to browse _all_ 
the phone content you'd need to root it, which I'm not prepared to do yet.

I also installed some adb software (dev-util/android-tools [3]) but that's not needed for 
regular use, I did it only to try to backup my daughter's phone before changing the 
cracked LCD. Fortunately I did not have to use that backup because the 'adb backup' 
command worked for a minimal set of apps only.

> While here, is there a website that lists all the android type phones,
> Samsung brand would be good, and compares them?  At some point I may
> upgrade but am having trouble finding out what has what and which is
> actually better.  When I'm trying to pick a CPU, I can find websites
> that list CPUs by power, L1 cache and a whole host of other things but I
> can't find one for cell phones.  Maybe my google terms aren't quite right.

I think you should look better :-)

Just one example (that I don't use):
https://www.phonearena.com/phones/Samsung-Galaxy-J2-Core_id10978
There's a compare button on the top right.

raffaele

[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/MTP
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideloading
[3] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Android/adb#About_ADB