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Why iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad Owners Should Use Linux

Posted by dmbkiwi on · 29 comments
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For a long time, using an iPhone with Linux was a complete no go. With a jailbroken phone, you could mount it over a wireless connection using fuse, and then sync music your music that way – but syncing an entire music collection via wifi? No thanks. However, thanks to some rather clever folk, there’s a new solution that gives you access to a whole lot of your iPhone functions on Linux “natively”.

For a long time, using an iPhone with Linux was a complete no go. With a jailbroken phone, you could mount it over a wireless connection using fuse, and then sync music your music that way – but syncing an entire music collection via wifi? No thanks. In fact, Apple had made it so hard to access the iPhone over USB, that it took the virtualbox and VMware developers months to work out how to access the iPhone via USB on a Windows guest. So this left Linux iPhone users with the option of either jailbreaking their phone and using a kludgy wifi connection, or running iTunes via windows in a VM. However, thanks to some rather clever folk, there’s a new solution that gives you access to a whole lot of your iPhone functions on Linux “natively”.

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Comments (29)

9 earlier comments in the full thread.

lth ·
I use a Sansa Clip+. I agree with herzeleid, just drag and drop. I have put a few audio books on it and it works well. I use PCLinuxOS and it sees it fine.
Steven_Rosenber ·
I'll be looking for deals on the Sansa Clip+ - thanks for your comments.

I'm no audiophile, but the Oggs I've been making from CDs have been sounding pretty good.

I don't know if Flac is all that necessary, but I've been trying to figure out the best format for long-term use.
tuxchick ·
Quoting: I've been trying to figure out the best format for long-term use.


Keep your high-quality masters archived in WAV or FLAC, and then you can generate any number of lesser-quality files from those.
moopst ·
My brother in law is an artist - not a techy so naturally he was drawn to Apple. He recorded my nephew using Garage Band and saved the files in Apples format. When his laptop got stolen he hooked his iPod up to the new laptop to sync it up. He says a message poped up saying something like "Would you like to use this computer for iTunes" to which he replied "Yes". I don't know if it said he would lose everything he has or if he didn't read all the fine print but he lost the ability to read his old files. I think rather than try to unlock them he deleted them all so no more Sean's first words and such. Nice move Apple.
Sander_Marechal ·
Quoting:I don't know if Flac is all that necessary, but I've been trying to figure out the best format for long-term use.


I agree with TC here. FLAC or WAV. Or any lossless format. Don't use lossy formats for long-term storage. Ever. This includes not using JPEG and JPEG2000 for your photos! Better save them as RAW or PNG or something.
Steven_Rosenber ·
How does Flac handle metadata? I think that might be a reason to use it over WAV - so you can get artist/title/album information embedded in the file.
Sander_Marechal ·
FLAC supports Metadata and Cue files.
chalbersma ·
Quoting: What's great is that the system sees it as a USB flash drive, so it's easy to manage it from multiple applications ... although FreeBSD refuses to mount it, and trying to do so freezes the console. In Windows, I get complaints from the system about being unable to properly "close" the player, and the permissions look like read only. Everything does work in Windows.


I've had this problem before. Give me a dmesg | tail after you plug in the device. I'm willing to bet it's a partition logic thing. Try mounting as > sudo mount_msdosfs /dev/sda1

instead of

> sudo mount_msdosfs /dev/sda0

or maybe perhaps

> sudo mount_msdosfs /dev/sda
Steven_Rosenber ·
You can't get a dmesg - if you plug it in and boot in FreeBSD, the boot process stops at da0 and doesn't assign any further device name(s). Once you unplug the USB device, the boot process continues with complaints about umass ...

Now that I blew FreeBSD off the box, I can't repeat the test. I tried to use the GhostBSD GNOME live CD, but it wouldn't boot at all, with nothing plugged in ...

I should try it in OpenBSD just for laughs ...
gus3 ·
Quoting:I should try it in OpenBSD just for laughs ...
Okay, but who will be laughing at whom?
Steven_Rosenber ·
If Flash wasn't an issue (Flash 7 in Opera on i386 is as far as you can go), I'd be Mr. OpenBSD.
gus3 ·
Is that Opera built for OpenBSD, or built for Linux and running on OpenBSD with kern.emul.linux=1 ?

http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq9.html#Interact

EDIT: Never mind. There is no Opera built for any BSD; Linux emulation is required for all x86 *BSD platforms.
chalbersma ·
PCBSD has Flash 10 running in Opera out of the box.
Steven_Rosenber ·
I'll get around to running PC-BSD - I don't think the live environment lets you install any applications to check them out before you commit to a full install.

Re: OpenBSD - yep, Opera is in Linux emulation mode.

I think that Opera does a build for FreeBSD, but the Flash plugin is still the Linux version running under emulation.

While I was happy to have Flash 9 in FreeBSD 7.3-release (I don't know if you can get Flash 10 in anything less than FBSD 8.0), it ate CPU like crazy, was loathe to give up said eating, and the video was pretty choppy. But at least you can get Flash 9/10 ... I just wish performance was better.
chalbersma ·
Ya BSD needs a native flash plugin.
Steven_Rosenber ·
Won't get it ... that's the pain of closed-source, single-source code.
gus3 ·
Quoting:Ya BSD needs a native flash plugin.
BSDash?
Steven_Rosenber ·
I think there's an evil Nvidia driver for 64-bit FreeBSD - so not every company that loves proprietary code is against releasing a binary for FreeBSD. OpenBSD wouldn't include it, of course, because they're against closed-source binaries.
chalbersma ·
It's one of the big reason's I'm pulling for HTML5 adoption.

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