Dennis Krul

Today I’ve been playing with virt-manager/libvirt (a Redhat emerging technologies project) on the new upcoming Ubuntu release Intrepid Ibex (8.10) and.. well..  it just works! I’m using it with KVM, for which you need hardware virtualization support.

It’s quite easy to create a new virtual machine, just clicky-clicky in the GUI, select an ISO to boot from and you’re ready to go. Even networking is automatically configured for you (using NAT by default). I’m impressed! Thank you, Redhat and Ubuntu developers, wherever you are!

Matt Colyer and friends have been busy reverse engineering the USB protocol used by Apple to sync iPhone and iPod touch devices and is now working on iFuse, an impressive project that will provide native USB access to those devices in Linux without the need for jailbreaking! As the name suggests, it is implemented as a FUSE filesystem.

By the way, you still need an app using libgpod to actually update the music library database on the iPod. iFuse only handles the mounting of the filesystem. I’m not sure if this works with Rhythmbox (since it uses libgpod for iPod support), but I guess I’ll just have to try. At least it works with gtkpod for the time being, which is better than the slow and inconvenient alternatives: jailbreaking and syncing over WiFi or running iTunes in a virtual machine (I use vmware player for this, because it is the only solution to properly virtualize USB 2.0).