Those of you who read my other blog as well as this one know I’ve been burning through Linux distros looking for one which both works with my Doro 626 phone and supports an NVIDIA driver version BOINC likes. Preferably a flavor of KDE desktop as well. This doesn’t sound like a tall order. In fact, I didn’t expect I would need to do anything at all. I mean my Kyocera DuraXV worked with Mint and most of my other distros out of the box, but, since I and most other people on the face of the planet are leaving Verizon a switch needed to be made.
If you still have one of the Kyocera phones please read this post before switching to Consumer Cellular. In theory, if you do everything listed there, your SIM will be unlocked and you will be able to take your phone with you. Verizon non-support will tell you it is not possible, but the dark lore of the Web says that works. I just wish I would have found it before I went to the Consumer Cellular retailer.
At any rate, there are a good many questions floating around the Web asking how to make the Doro 626 and other phones work with Linux distro YYY. Most responses will try to tell you to navigate to a non-existent menu option to switch phone to “mtp.” While some phones do have this option, the more basic phones do not.
If you wish to avoid all of this hassle and you don’t care about a KDE desktop then download the January 2017 release of Solus. This distro worked out of the box. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed worked as well, it just has no NVIDIA support. A bit more info can be found here.
From what I’ve been able to scrape together many distros are missing a udev rule needed to support the Doro 626 and many other devices which do not provide a menu option to force mtp mode. Given the sheer buying power of the AARP world phones with simple larger button interfaces are making a comeback in the market. Besides being a bit cheaper to make and simpler to use it is easier to make these phones survive drops onto sidewalks and dunks into water. Two things stiffer fingers tend to cause.
Until all of the distros catch up here is a hack you can use to work around the issue. Open a terminal window and type
sudo nano /etc/usb_modeswitch.conf
Change the line:
DisableSwitching=0
to
DisableSwitching=1
then reboot and plug in your phone. The notifier window should pop up showing a new storage device with < 100Meg of storage.
If your distro does not provide the nano editor you will have to do a bit of Web surfing to identify which terminal editor it does provide or how to launch the built in graphical editor in sudo/root/administrator mode.
Edit:
Once you verify that works, the safer hack is to undo that hack then
sudo nano /lib/udev/rules.d/40-usb_modeswitch.rules
and change
# MediaTek/Medion S4222 and probably others, MediaTek MT6276M and others
ATTR{idVendor}=="0e8d", ATTR{idProduct}=="0002", RUN+="usb_modeswitch '%b/%k'"
to comment out the second line
# ATTR{idVendor}=="0e8d", ATTR{idProduct}=="0002", RUN+="usb_modeswitch '%b/%k'"
save and reboot. Your phone should still be found. Some distros put the file in /usr/lib instead of /lib.