I was faced with trying to connect an Acer BI tablet to my Mint machines as an external storage device, and had to glean this information from the various sources.

Thought I would make it easier for Mint users and save all the searching. There is no reason to suppose this will not work for other troublesome USB devices.

This was done on LMDE but the procedure should be the same on Mint 15

Open a root terminal in LMDE. (In Mint 15 you will have to type sudo in front of every command or type sudo su first to make it stay root).

1) Type the following to install the mtpfs package:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install mtpfs


Next plug the Tablet into your PC and power it up


2)

# lsusb

In the output look for the line that contains ID 0502:3437 Acer, Inc
Take a note of the first part of the ID number, 0502 in this case.


Bus 003 Device 002: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB-2.0 4-Port HUB
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0bda:0151 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Mass Storage Device (Multicard Reader)
Bus 007 Device 002: ID 045e:00dd Microsoft Corp. Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000 V1.0
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 04fc:0538 Sunplus Technology Co., Ltd Wireless Optical Mouse 2.4G [Bright]
Bus 003 Device 006: ID 0502:3473 Acer, Inc.



3) I used nano as a text editor, you can substitute an editor of your choice. like gedit, pluma or any other.


# nano /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules


Enter the following line in the editor and save.
Note: the {idVendor}=="number" should be the same as number you noted earlier .

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="0502", MODE="0666"



5) Now you need to create a mount point with yourself as owner. The mount point can have any name. I like easy to type stuff, so I made it ab1 to save typing AcerB1, the choice is yours.

# mkdir /media/ab1

This following line sets the (user):(group). If your login name is fred change the user:user to fred:fred

# chown user:user /media/ab1



6)

# nano /etc/fstab

Add this line. Note: it should be 'user' but that refused to mount as an ordinary user, that could be a Mate desktop thing, but changing it to 'users' did the trick.

# mount point for Acer B1
mtpfs     /media/ab1    fuse     users,noauto,allow_other      0      0



Nearly done


7)

# nano /etc/fuse.conf

Remove the hash from in front of this line
 
#user_allow_other


and save



8) Add yourself to the fuse group.

# nano /etc/group

Look for the line starting with "fuse" and put your login name at the end of that line (if it's not already there?).

and save



9) Make sure the tablet is still powered up, connected, and do:

# mount -a

Now the device should show up in your file browser and you should be able to mount and unmount it. If it doesn't, try rebooting. The tab can take a few moments to connect so be patient. Right now I can only transfer files to and from the /micro-SD card I have installed in the tablet, not sure why yet? but still better than no connectivity at all.

 
Hope that's of some help to someone.