Native iPhone/iPod touch support in Linux? There is hope after all!
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).
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Hey, old post here i know, bu there’s not alot of info out there on this. I’ve read Hank’s writings (www.huanix.com) on this, and he’s done some good work, the iFuse details don’t seem to be on his site however.
Your solution for VM ware is good, and as of the latest “Sun” Virtual Box releases,only the vmx version, not community edition as far as I know, though i havn’t tried, they fully support the full usb 2.0 abstraction. I use this to run my itunes wrapper, i mean windows.
As for native support, that would be far more efficient on system resources and preferable. This feels like something there’s been little or no progress on in about 6 or 8 months. I suppose i’m writing this post here and subsequently elsewhere, to highlight that issue. I want to sync my latest personal electronics on linux as soon as i can, without voiding waranties or service agreements. As much as jailbreaking tempts me, and with cidia opening up as a major app store competitor.. yikes. But i feel the community is served better by openly achieving what was intended to be a closed loop by that corporate pimp Apple.
Anyway, lets see if we can make some progress here.