Submitted by Well, this is a welcome surprise for those of us waiting for Ubuntu 10.04, the Lucid Lynx. Several users are reporting that their iPod Touches and iPhones (including the 3GS) work in alpha 3 – without tweaking, without jailbreaking, without patching – with Nautilus and Rythmbox.
Several users have reported that upon installing the third alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, their iPod Touches and iPhones are recognised by the operating system. You can browse your iPhone/iPod with the file manager, and Rythmbox can work with them as well.
It appears – please correct me if I’m wrong – that this support comes courtesy of GVFS supporting libiphone, combined with iFuse. iFuse is a FUSE file system driver that connects to your iPod Touch/iPhone through libiphone, using Apple’s native AFC protocol (so no ssh or other complicated nonsense). No jailbreaking needed, no patching, no nothing.
It works with music and photos, and support for calendar and contacts is under way – one-way syncing already works through Conduit (import information from your device). Note, however, that you can’t just simply drag and drop songs onto the device; Apple uses a proprietary database format (no surprise there) to store song information, so you need to update that too. Sadly, iPhone OS 3.x and higher are not yet officially supported this way, but it is coming.
Hopefully, everything will work by the time the new Ubuntu release is out, and hopefully, other distributions adopt this functionality as well. Of course, Apple will most likely continue its childish act of releasing updates solely to break this functionality, but hopefully the open source community will be able to keep up the pace, narrowing the window between Apple breakage and open source fixage.
Over the weekend, I moved my main desktop over to Linux entirely (erasing Windows), so this functionality couldn’t have come at a better time.
Is impressing the way Ubuntu developers are paying attention to detail, and what the users want/need. I have moved my wife’s netbook to ubuntu and I have always run Arch Linux, the good thing is that in Linux all distributions benefit from the advancement of the other.
Ubuntu developers have nothing to do with this. iPhone support was developed without any help of Canonical/Ubuntu. iFuse is an independent project.
But isn’t it nice when it just works?
*** goes back to watching emerge -uDN world
I find the set of people who say that things “just work” to be one of the most dangerous to technical computing. Thing about what you are saying: “This functionality was probably pretty complicated to create. I wonder how it works…. Eh. Don’t care. Probably magic.” This is the danger of things like iPad. We give up a lot when we stop trying to understand how our software works.
Do i have to sync, or can i just drag’n’drop? I understand that i can’t drag’n’drop right in the file manager (due to the db “situation”), but drag and drop in supported applications (such as rhythmbox) perhaps?
Don’t know about Rhythmbox as these applications tend to be a little behind the curve sometimes – Yes, they all use libgpod underneath but somehow manage to screw up the iTunesDB file every now and then – but a reasonably up to date GTKPod with AAC support – perhaps Ubuntu’s has it by default, I dunno – should do the trick. And yes, it is pretty much a matter of drag and drop with GTKPod.
GTKPod’s UI is terrible by most accounts but it is not too bad once you get used to its quirks. And the article is accurate regarding the situation with the database: as long as you do not update iPod’s firmware to the latest, it should work alright. Jailbreak or not.
Also I really recommend Handbrake to encode videos to a format suitable for iPods and iPhones. Avidemux supposedly should work as well but I never managed to reencode a file that played flawlessly on the iPod Touch with it whereas Handbrake works everytime and has some of the functionality of Avidemux built-in such as support for subtitles.
You can just drag and drop. As far as I can tell, Rhythmbox doesn’t support iTunes-style sync anyway so drag/drop is the only way. Note that if you’re a keyboard user you can use the typical cut/paste keystrokes instead of drag and drop, something iTunes doesn’t support and something I for one greatly appreciate.
Itunes is in their view crucial and you aren’t allowed to live without that bloated piece of spyware.
Don’t get me wrong Itunes is bloated and, I don’t like or use it, but it’s not spyware.
Also if you don’t like it itunes, either buy a different phone/media player or wait for the community to come up with support.
Bashing for the sake of bashing gets you nowhere.
How is gathering data about me (especially my music collection) and then using it for profit (Genie feature etc) not spyware?
And I obviously don’t use it.
I believe you don’t know what spy really means, let me help you:
SPY: descry: catch sight of watch, observe, or inquire secretly. People that use the “genie” feature are informed before they begin to use it. It’s not a spyware.
Spyware, Monopoly, proprietary and freedom are words that those days everyone use, but only a fews seems to know what they really mean.
Edited 2010-03-01 18:47 UTC
Itunes always did send your collection data to Apple and I think most people did not know that (which is sufficiently secret)
That data enabled Apple to make the Genie feature in the first place.
@kragil:
have you got any evidence for this?
That’s the reason why users should read softwares Licenses; don’t matter if it’s OSS, freeware or closed source!
making libelous and defamatory statements are punishable by law and subject to monetary damages and punitive relief.
Edited 2010-03-01 19:23 UTC
Then most people must have been blocking it as Genius was useless when it was first introduced (and still is for some genres) due to….. lack of data.
As Genius is and always has been opt in how exactly is that spyware if I choose to allow it?
Apple always gathered data about users music collection (via cover download etc).
How else did Steve in his famous “thoughts on music” know that only 3% of peoples music has been bought on Itunes??
Not to say they aren’t gathering anything, but couldn’t he have pulled that % out of his rear?
Isn’t it just a case of counting how many songs you sell, regardless to who, how many others sell and calculating the percentage?
I’d hardly would call this spying. If they didn’t collect this information they wouldn’t be able to produce any financial data regarding their business which would be a violation of the law.
In any case, the “spy” features of iTunes are all opt-in and can easily be turned off again. I actually often use the Genius option.
@kragil:
it’s so easy to do this! let’s try together:
We sell mp3-player and Music:
We’ve sold 10 MP3-player in each one has capacity for 10 Songs:
we’ve sold 20 Songs in our Music-store.
How Many Percent of the Music we sold are on our MP3-Players?
as you can see it’s not difficult to make such statement
The genius feature is ‘opt-in’. It’s not spyware if the spy was honest about its intentions and you knowingly gave up the data.
It is the one reason why I don’t have a iPod any more; ignoring the fact that there is a lock in between iTunes and iPod; iTunes on Mac and Windows is just plain horrible; slow, buggy, the ripping is pathetic at best when it comes to handling a cd that might have an ever so slight scratch – hence the reason I used XLD now.
The EU has worked together with mobile phone produces to come up with a standard connector, maybe the EU can come up with a standard and open synchronisation protocol (for music/video and firmware updates) so that one can use what ever application they wish with their device.
How long ’til Apple releases a “software update” that blocks their iDevices from working in Ubuntu?
They already have… iPhone OS 3.x isn’t supported.
I don’t know about lucid alpha 3, but I have my iPhone 3gs running iPhone OS 3.1.3 and not jailbroken working in Ubuntu Karmic, and it really didn’t take much to get it going either. That being said, the usual caveats of Apple devices without iTunes apply of course. No software updates, certain filetypes won’t transfer (gtkpod still doesn’t support the transfer of video nor audiobooks properly). Still, that’s nothing to do with iPhone OS 3 and everything to do with where gtkpod concentrated their focus.
True.
Don’t know about audiobooks as I personally don’t use them but videos DO work! And using GTKPod nonetheless. I just had to make sure to use the AAC enabled version of GTKPod available on Debian Multimedia (I *believe* that Ubuntu ships theirs with AAC support compiled in it). Then it is just a matter of using Handbrake as the encoder for your videos as most other tools never worked satisfactory – to me, anyway. Your mileage may vary, though. Avidemux allegedly works but I never managed to reencode a file that played acceptably on the iPod Touch not even once and Debian has a few wrapper scripts around mencoder and ffmpeg that claim to be able to reencode such videos as well.
I’ve been reencoding some episodes of my anime and TV shows collections to watch on the iPod and so far it has been working great.
I know how to create iPod videos, Handbrake is indeed the best tool for the job. Gtkpod doesn’t want to import them properly though, it gives me an error most of the time and the rest it tries to dump them into the music library. Audiobooks just get dumped into the music section which is odd, since the iPod is typically able to treat m4b files as audiobooks without trouble. Gtkpod does make hash of the iPod’s audiobook database more times than not though. Oh well, I’ve got a Rockbox-enabled Sansa Fuze for Audiobooks and I encode any Audiobooks I purchase on CD to ogg vorbis anyway. I just have quite a few from iTunes, all of which have the Fairplay DRM removed naturally.
Are you referring to the fact that it does not differentiate songs from video files and dump everything together on the same library? Yes, that is a little annoying but can be mitigated to an extent if you use GTKPod filter to find the video files using their file extension since they most likely will be missing tags.
As for the error messages, are you sure that you are using the version compiled with AAC support?
deadfish:~# apt-cache search gtkpod
gtkpod-data – architecture-independent files for gtkpod
gtkpod – manage songs and playlists on an Apple iPod
gtkpod-aac – manage songs and playlists on an Apple iPod
gtkpod-aac-data – architecture-independent files for gtkpod
This is on a mixed Squeeze/Sid install. I found that installing the AAC-enabled version solved most problems that I had with GTKPod and Apple-specific formats. Unless you’re getting error messages that I am not aware of.
I’ll agree with your statement about GTKPod re-hashing the database more often than it needs, though. That is annoying.
Sorry if it sounds like I am trying to convince you to use it no matter what. This couldn’t be further from the truth. It is just that I think that it might be helpful to you and other regulars that might have bumped into the same problems…
Edited 2010-03-01 23:10 UTC
Yep I have AAC support, it handles my AAC music just fine.
N0pe. Not true. iPod touch, 32GB, iPhone OS 3.1.3, Ubuntu 10.04 with updates as of today. I just connected it to my Ubuntu box and it works with rythmbox without any trouble.
Edited 2010-03-01 23:58 UTC
Somehow I think the biggest news in this article is
“Over the weekend, I moved my main desktop over to Linux entirely (erasing Windows), so this functionality couldn’t have come at a better time.”
What what WHAAT? Damn Thom, I didn’t see that coming. Good to have you in the camp of Good and Light finally.
I’ve been using Linux in one form or another since 2001 or 2002. I’ve always had Linux installs around since then. The difference is that over the past few months, I came to realise I needed to invoke my Grand Rule of Thumb: if a Free alternative is at least almost as good as the non-Free alternative, then Free it is.
Mind, though, that I still have countless (okay, two) other machines running Windows 7. They’re both media centres running Boxee (living room and bedroom).
The only remaining problem right now is my deep-rooted hatred for OpenOffice – but I’m willing to lose a few nails and hairs over that one.
You’ll be back. 🙂
Well my problem with open office has always been that it was slow as molasses. With 3.2 speed has increased quite noticeably. That and a few fixes in spreadsheets and ive been using it exclusively. We were using office 2000 in windows for all of our office needs. Congrats on your move to linux been using it since mandrake (now using (mostly)ubuntu)
…Wait, isn’t Boxee available for linux boxes?
Yes, but without hardware acceleration for the UI or video playback, which makes a hell of a difference in day-to-day use for a media centre. On top of that, Linux doesn’t have drivers for my IR receiver for the bedroom media centre (yes, I am fully aware how incredibly decadent that sounds), and I’m not getting out of bed every time I need to interact with it.
Well, that just shows that in terms of coolness, there are maybe stuff more important than working with the iStuff.
As for the remote… Buy an iPhone, for the (neat) boxee control app (THAT would be decadent)
I already have an iPhone. And that app. But touch screen sucks for remotes, especially when you’re lying in bed. Very impractical – can’t beat the tactile feedback (=blind use) of a real remote.
Now, the important follow ups:
What distro?
What window manager?
Keep in mind that the answers to these questions will both inform us and provide context for all further reviews of different OS topics. I’ll even invoke my mayflower privilege of extending protection under the fifth amendment to the US constitution (right to avoid self incrimination) to a non citizen.
thomholwerda@ExtraordinaryMachine:~$ uname -a
Linux ExtraordinaryMachine 2.6.31-19-generic-pae #56-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jan 28 02:29:51 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
thomholwerda@ExtraordinaryMachine:~$ dpkg -s gnome-about
Package: gnome-about
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: gnome
Installed-Size: 320
Maintainer: Ubuntu Desktop Team <[email protected]>
Architecture: all
Source: gnome-desktop
Version: 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu3
Replaces: gnome-desktop-data (<< 2.12)
Depends: python (>= 2.4), python-gtk2, python-gobject, python-gnome2, python-cairo, gnome-desktop-data (= 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu3)
Conflicts: gnome-core (<< 1.5), gnome-desktop-data (<< 2.12)
Description: The GNOME about box
Informative little about thing that lets us brag to our friends as our name
scrolls by, and lets users click to load the GNOME home pages.
Original-Maintainer: Ondřej Surý <[email protected]>
Python-Version: >= 2.4
And ofcourse Chrome Beta is available for Linux, that you couldn’t have lifed without I’m sure. 😉
I’m running Alpha 3 and last night I plugged my phone in with the sole intent of charging it. I expected it to pop up the usual “you’ve plugged in a digital camera” box and ask me if I wanted to import my photos, but you could have knocked me down with a feather when I saw I was actually able to manipulate my music. Top stuff!
Also, well done to you, Thom, on your switch. I’ve recently decided to make Linux my primary platform for work and use Windows just for games and the like as many have. I’d never have the guts to go fully native.
Edited 2010-03-01 20:07 UTC
Congrats Thom. Stick with it. It may help to know there are many that have made the switch and survived. I switched over in 2003/2004 after 8 years of playing around. I can’t go back to MS or Apple products, they now frustrate me. I do have a Win7 session in Vbox to solve any issues / test software etc when the need arises but this only happens maybe once a week. There is great satisfaction in saying to friends and family when they ask for help: “sorry, I don’t do Windows”.
Euh, how is that supposed to feel satisfying? I love my friends and family, and gladly help them with whatever problems – computer-related or otherwise – they might have.
I’m sorry, but that just sounds… Egoistic to me.
I wouldn’t say satisfying necessarily, but if you’ve got a family like mine who mostly run Windows and don’t listen to a fracking thing you tell them about viruses and computer safety, and they call up repeatedly asking for help from the same problems over and over and over again when if they’d just listened they wouldn’t be having those problems in the first place… well, it’s not satisfying so much as it can be a relief to tell them to go somewhere else if they won’t listen. One of them finally got a Mac, and I’m not getting calls from that one over and over again anymore apart from the occasional how to question which is fine. I don’t mind helping out, but if it gets to the point where you feel like a broken record, sometimes there’s a breaking point and you just don’t want to deal with it anymore. For now, Mac and Linux at least provide a break for those willing to use them–a break for them, and for me.
Put them on a limited account. It works wonders.
If they bitch then tell them they can buy a mac mini as an alternative.
Don’t let your relatives turn you into their own personal support tech.
Limited accounts are useless in XP. I tried that, and I ended up having to help them even more than I otherwise did because of badly-written bullshit that assumed it had admin access.
That doesn’t make limited accounts useless.
Yes there is software for XP that needs admin access because the developers didn’t bother checking and because MS was less restrictive with account separation.
But there are ways around this like having a separate account for web surfing. A VM can sometimes be useful in this situation.
Vista/7 really cut down the malware anyways for problem users so you might want to tell them that you no longer support XP for security reasons.
The worst machines I have seen by far have been XP boxes. People also have an easier time installing printers with Vista/7 so you will get fewer calls there as well.
But I can empathize with your situation. At some point I just cut everyone off except for a few relatives that I happen to see regularly. I’m much happier.
It does if I have to keep helping them to work around the limitations of a restricted account when they want to try a piece of software that’s shite. Telling them it’s shite doesn’t help either. And oh yes, Vista… the os where I have to keep instructing them how to connecto Wifi because it forgets every few days and Microsoft hid the option behind a few useless layers. Yes, that’s so much better.
You have to tell them that they can’t try new software as part of your support. Like I said if they bitch tell them to get a mac.
As for Vista it doesn’t forget Wifi settings.
Edited 2010-03-03 20:28 UTC
I already did that. It worked on one of them, thank goodness. But telling them they can’t try new software? That’s what people do. If they aren’t allowed to try new things then I really should have them get iPads.
Oh yes it does at least when dealing with certain chipsets. I’ve not figured out why, since that is supposed to be handled by the OS and should work irrespective of the driver being used, but nevertheless it happens a lot on one particular system I end up dealing with. It’s a Broadcom chipset though I can’t remember the model off the top of my head.
Well… It gets tiring after the first 1500 times they call you with the same old, same old problems.
It gets a little better when they’re willing to pay for your services but most relatives simply think that you enjoy spending hours fixing their computers for nothing only to come back few weeks later.
I used to be just like you not too long ago but these days I mostly respond saying that I don’t know anything about computers at all and avoid having to explain what Linux is, etc.
Selfish much? ^_^
Completely agree on this. They made us he monsters we are.
It has became so bad for me that I even say to my boss that I don’t know anything about computers, and I am in IT business. He doesn’t seem to care as long as I have a pulse and don’t smell too bad he’s fine.
I really love the whole capital-s-Switch crowd. I sort of take pride in that I have Switched operating systems at least 6 times now in a big way, and am planning on Switching again in another month or so.
I take great satisfaction in being able to solve problems on most of the operating systems that have been in use during the period I’ve been alive, and a few from before then.
Edited 2010-03-01 22:55 UTC
I found this recently: http://giagio.com/wiki/moin.cgi/iPhoneEthernetDriver
iPhone USB ethernet drivers. They work great as well. I hope they make it into lucid.
My initial impression is that these tethering drivers work without making any modifications to the iPhone itself (the page that was linked to literally says that exact thing). Weird that they wouldn’t have direct USB access to the 3g modem locked down…
I do not think any of these new features require jailbreak. The idea is to have iphone support in linux working natively, without modifictaion to the phone, same way you do in windows and mac.
Thom Holwerda switched to Linux! What was the article about anyway. Thats all I saw.
I’d just be happy if they’d upgrade to a version of subversion that can properly handle replacements during a merge.
My only reservation about this tacit support for iPods and iPhones in the upcoming Ubuntu release is how long will it last? Recent news of the tit for tat battle between Palm and Apple over iTunes compatibility for the Palm Pre shows how fickle Apple is when it comes to third party compatibility with its precious hardware or software. Obviously I’m comparing Apples to Oranges (pun absolutely intended!) but nevertheless, I doubt Apple will be satisfied with any other software managing its hardware. While I’m all for an open source replacement for iTunes, I will continue to put my support behind media players and devices that support FOSS operating systems and non-proprietary media management software directly, rather than an as an afterthought or happy coincidence.
They aren’t fickle; They are consistently hostile.
Customer of mine is going to offer at his public premisses a download station. Running on kiosk mode linux. So what the customer will be able to do is, copy tracks across from the download station onto his mp3 or his mobile phone.
This station is going to have a large sign on it: Not for use with Apple products.
Why? Because he is aware that he could supply Gtkpod, but what he’s not prepared for is the howls of rage when it turns out Apple has sabotaged the package in the new firmware release, and some poor chap has scrambled his iPod or iPhone database.
Incidentally, he was worried about something else which I did not know the answer to. If you start up your iPod with the Mac version of iTunes, he tells me that it sets the file system to HFS+. Is this true? Then, he is worried that if he puts in Windows and iTunes on it, which he anyway is not enthused about, what happens if someone updates a Mac intitialised system from a Windows version of iTunes? Does it explode?
For non iPhone OS devices it is true. If you initialize your iPod in OS X the filesystem is HFS+, if done in Windows it is FAT32. iTunes accesses these iPod devices over a protocol similar to UMS, in contrast to the iPhone OS which it communicates with via a limited Ethernet over USB protocol, the usbmux protocol. iPhone OS devices are formatted with their own filesystem, I presume it’s a variant of HFS+ though I’m not 100% sure of that.
You won’t be able to do it. Windows cannot read HFS+ without third party filesystem drivers, and afaik none of these work with iTunes. The reverse is not true however, OS X can obviously read and write FAT32… but, in typical Apple fashion, they’ve got an arbitrary limitation that will not allow you to update Windows-formatted devices in OS X. When you try, it gives you a message that you must initialize your iPod (i.e. reformat it) for use with OS X. Stupid and pointless, since OS X is fully capable of handling FAT32 to begin with. So no, it won’t explode, but you might from frustration.
Ah, no. That used to be true. You now get the option in OS X as to whether you use FAT32 or HFS+. In Windows, it’s just FAT32.
Thanks, didn’t realize they’d added an option in there for that. I take it the update limitation for FAT32 devices in OS X is gone too then? I haven’t owned a non-iPhone OS iPod for a while, thought about getting a 5th gen Nano for portability and battery but decided on a Rockbox-ready Sansa Fuze instead for its ogg support.
In the “bad old days” iTunes on a Mac wouldn’t even talk to a Windows formatted iPod (and vice versa..) IIRC, they added the feature sometime after the iPod Video got released – at least, by 2008 when I got my MacBook, it all worked fine.
That’s a good point, and a lot of newcomers to Ubuntu won’t blame Apple for their problems but will blame Ubuntu, Canonical, and Linux in general. It could really backfire on them. As for the standard protocol, it’s called USB mass storage. If every player used that, then all that would need to be different based on each player’s requirements is the database format. As a communication protocol though, mass storage is perfect. You could then have the music management software recognize the player and load an appropriate database plugin so it knows what to do, or do something similar to what Rockbox and Symbian phones do where, once the files are copied, you refresh the database on the player itself with a few quick selections. The music manager approach is probably best for those who want iPod-like functionality, but those of us who like to just copy files could have our cake too this way.
What portable player manufacturers are supporting open source though? Sandisk, while I wouldn’t say they’ve supported it all that much in recent months, at least hasn’t gone out of their way to thwart Rockbox for example and for a while they were rather enthusiastic about getting Rockbox working on some of their players. I personally have a Fuze with Rockbox and love it.
I think the one hurdle Linux is going to face when it comes to content delivery is online purchased content. We’ve got music pretty well covered with Amazon MP3, Emusic, etc but Movies are something else with the movie industry going into draconian overdrive mode. Audiobooks aren’t too good of a situation either though it’s somewhat better than movies. Bottom line is that people are going to want to buy content to make use of this iPod support, and not just music. Where are they going to get it? Most people aren’t interested in transcoding their own DVDs just to watch them on their iPod. Crazy as it might be, no matter what I personally think of it, most would rather just buy or rent an iPod version from iTunes as it’s a lot easier and quicker. So what happens when the new Linux user asks “Cool, my iPod works! Now where’s iTunes?”
At least in Alpha 3, don’t copy anything over to the iPod. I did and now I am restoring iPod back to its factory settings. Luckily I have the backup of everything on it!
You have to do that every two months anyway even if you use iTunes on Windows; it’s a known problem with iPods, not with Ubuntu.
And I agree with the earlier poster: It’s not Canonical’s efforts, it’s upstream.
While this news is very welcome to me because my father has an iPhone, I would appreciate it if someone could reverse-engineer a WMV9 encoder so I can use my Walkman’s OLED screen to its fullest. Why put in all this time to support an unfriendly product that will break support soon (the iProducts) when you can better support Linux-friendly devices?
How is a walkman requiring a proprietary WMV video format Linux friendly?
This is odd, I have several iPods and I never needed to restore any. Not even my iPod Mini which I bought 5 years ago and I still use on occasion.
I guess they will forget about Kubuntu and Amarok alltogether… Unless someone can reassure us.
Probably. Perhaps they should drop Kubuntu altogether, Ubuntu is primarily a GNOME distro and Kubuntu is always second class there. As a GNOME user I don’t care one way or the other, there are loads of good KDE distros from what I’ve heard. Ubuntu isn’t focused on KDE, and that’s been apparent from the beginning.
No, support for Amarok is also being worked on
Why would they? It’s better than other KDE distros (oooooh, that’s going to sting some people). It just works, at least for me which is after all what I care about.
As someone who just gave up on OpenSUSE it is really be nice to be back in Kubuntu. Sorry, I cant stand package management from the stone age and the overall horrors of Yast. Sorry but Yast is ass. Don’t even get me started on Mandriva (Yes, I’ve tried it).
“Over the weekend, I moved my main desktop over to Linux entirely (erasing Windows), so this functionality couldn’t have come at a better time.”
Good move Thom!
Cool, but I have been happy with the Sansa which was works flawlessly in Ubuntu and has been for years.