MTP, a Microsoft invention, sits on a lot mobile phones and other devices these days. It’s a protocol that makes the transfer of media better/more convenient somehow (whatever is wrong with plain filesystems, I really don’t know…) Wikipedia has a list of devices it infects.

This doesn’t work to well with Linux, as with most Microsoft protocols. libmtp does support some devices, however. See if yours is listed here. As libmtp develops that list may become out of date. There’s a simple command you can type to see if your device is supported: ‘mtp-detect’.

If you receive something like ‘LIBMTP PANIC: Unable to read device information on device 12 on bus 0, trying to continue. Unable to open raw device 0’ or other errors occur then you’re out of luck, I’m afraid. If you don’t find any critical errors, then I suggest you try ‘mtpfs’ — you can view your phone’s files in a filesystem format.