Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Samsung Galaxy S, and Linux

Not sure whether to post this here, or in the hardware forum, but here goes.

I’m looking to purchase a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (new, not replacing any piece of current hardware) and a Samsung Galaxy S or S-2 based mobile phone (to replace my iPhone). I’m trying to do Linux / Android from top to bottom, and I was thinking that all of these devices would operate together better than Linux and iOS based devices do currently (for example, I always have a devil of a time with my iPhone connecting to my Linux machines, seems like with every firmware update, connectivity breaks. I can only imagine the struggles with an iPad and / or iOS5 when it comes out).

So for those of you who have either or both of the above, how well do they work with Linux? Specifically, transferring / syncing data back and forth, applying updates (I don’t like having to use iTunes for that currently, it’s the ONLY reason I have a Windows VM), integration with Linux apps (music players, file manager, desktop environments, etc), using an external screen with a tablet to show presentations, watch videos – things of that nature?

TIA…

Wow, 1900+ views, but no replies. Obviously this topic is of a lot of interest to people … I know that someone out there has to have one or both of these devices and using one or both of them with Linux (doesn’t have to be openSUSE or SLES though).

Anyone?

I have an Android phone and it works ok with my Linux boxes. When you connect it to the Computer it will be recognised as an USB drive and with that you can exchange data and so on. You also can transmit data via Bluetooth if you want to. With the Galaxy Tab there also shouldn’t be issues with that

I think this quote is stopping some potential replies:

You have restricted the replies to users with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which I think is not out yet ? or just ht th emarket) and to the Samsung Galaxy S or S-2 based mobile phone.

Thats a very much reduced response base.

Not well at all.

Samsung requires Keis (only works on Windows/Mac) to interface with the device and even on Windows that doesn’t work well. However what you can do is install the Android SDK and that’ll give you a program called “adb” which gives command-line ssh access to the device. For a lot of stuff, you’ll need to root the tablet to access certain folders, etc on it.

One exception? The Nexus S, which Google required to be able to connect as a normal USB device.

EDIT: As to why you had 1900+ views and no replies? Your post title suggests you have some answer, not a question. Most likely the majority of people clicked in to learn, but found you were asking a question to which they had no answer.

Thanks for the replies, and yes I purposely narrowed it down to 2 different devices as they are generally accepted to be the best all-around Android-based devices out there (according to several media sites that I read). And I would agree that the volume of views shows that there is lots of interest in this subject.

So to answer my own question, I just grabbed my Linux laptop and took a trip down to my local Best Buy store. I found out the following:

the phone works pretty well. As someone posted, just plug it in and off you go. Syncing music, pics, etc – no problem.

The Galaxy Tab, though, is another story. You need to install some additional libraries to get things up and going (libmtp or mtpfs if I recall correctly), and even then I couldn’t get file transfer back and forth to work properly. I didn’t have a lot of time to figure out why (as I was standing at my local Best Buy trying this out, and the salesperson was getting impatient with me, and other people wanted to play with the device too), but so far that’s been my experience.

I still think I’ll pick these devices up at some point this year, as I really want to love Android and I think that it suits me better than iOS (I jailbreak my iOS devices, I think I could do a lot of the same thing with a non-rooted Android device), and am willing to give them a shot as a business / corporate / enterprise user. My company supports iOS quite heavily, but Android-based devices are a different story (though I am willing to be a guinea-pig). My initial post here was just to try and understand what I was getting myself into, and what potential hurdles I might have to overcome.

What version of Android was on the Galaxy Tab at the local shop ?

I note that some Galaxy Tabs were shipped with Android-3.0, although purportedly 3.1 is out for the Galaxy Tab (Android 3.2 is purportedly an update mainly to help 7" tablets).

From what I have read, one really needs at least Android-3.1 in order to be able to more easily connect via USB to a Galaxy Tab. If that shop only had a Galaxy Tab with Android version 3.0, that might explain some of your difficulty.

It was 3.1 … but I’ll admit that my time was limited, and if I had longer I might have been able to figure out if the problems I had were software-related, me-related, or something else.

I’ll try and get back down there, maybe at a less-busy time, and see if I can’t figure out what I might have been doing wrong.

No, I have it with 3.1 and I’ve never been able to get it to work with mtpfs. Instead, I installed the Android SDK and use the program that comes with it to do file transfer and it works perfectly.