Using a Nook HD with Debian Wheezy

About a year ago my wife decided to buy a Barnes & Noble Nook HD when they were very much on sale. She used it as a standalone device for some time, but eventually wanted to move some of her music to it. By then, her notebook was running Debian 7. She found that her Nook was mounted read-only.

I found Philip Langdale's gvfs-mtp PPA which as I understand it updates gvfs-backends to include support for MTP. I added the PPA keys:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:langdalepl/gvfs-mtp

Updated:

sudo apt-get update

And saw that the PPA was not found. I noticed that the output indicated wheezy main. Knowing this wasn't right, I opened /etc/apt/sources.list but did not see the PPA. Then, I opened synaptic, did see the PPA, and modified the two sources to point at precise instead of wheezy. (Looked into this a little. Apparently, apt-get-repository writes to files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d when a PPA is involved, not to /etc/apt/sources.list.) A subsequent update succeeded. I followed this with:

sudo apt-get upgrade

And found that the Nook would mount writable. In nautilus it's now possible for my wife to drag music from her computer to her Nook.