Starting with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, the OS switched to MTP from USB Mass Storage mode for access to the device's storage via USB. MTP stands for Media Transfer Protocol, and it carries several benefits over USB Mass Storage. Unlike the latter, MTP allows you to simultaneously access the storage on both the device as well as the computer. Also, with MTP, corrupt file transfers are theoretically much less probable.

While accessing the storage via MTP from a Windows PC is a piece of cake due to excellent driver support, doing so in Linux can be a hassle, as the OS doesn't ship with said support by default. XDA Recognized Developer & Contributor Lloir has come to the rescue with his guide that details the process of enabling MTP access on several popular Linux distributions.

While the method was originally developed for the HTC One X+, it should work fine for other Android devices that use MTP instead of USB Mass Storage. Currently, the method supports Arch Linux, Debian, and all distributions based on Debian such as Ubuntu and Mint. The developer plans on adding support for more distributions in the future as well.

You can find the complete guide at the forum thread.