[Gllug] iPhone syncing

damion.yates at gmail.com damion.yates at gmail.com
Thu Aug 19 21:08:04 UTC 2010


Does anyone have any experience with owning an iPhone without having
easy access to iTunes?

All that I need is the ability to upload videos to the iPhone (I can create
valid ones transcoding with ffmpeg).  Sync photos off.  And ideally fix
the phone if it goes wrong, or if necessary let it receive the latest
iOS version.  It would be handy for the apps to be backed up and
restored, but I can also simply keep a text file list somewhere of what
they were and download them again if necessary (they were all free).

I have found the following:

http://www.libimobiledevice.org/
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/ipod-touch-3g-sync-over-usb-without-jailbraking-in-ubuntu-karmic.html
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=20885

This seems to cover of 95% of what I want, but I'd like to know from
somebody who has done this.  It's also not clear how this works with an
iTunes account, is some secret key passed from an existing copy of
iTunes?  Will I still be able to install new apps from the phone?  I
certainly don't want to jailbreak.

Also nothing seems to provide what I'm most worried about.  That is,
dealing with a somehow dead iPhone and unbricking it, upgrading the OS
or sorting it out if the SIM somehow changes.

At the moment, I can email photos off the thing, use the store from the
device itself, and use youtube for video watching rather than uploading
stuff to it.  So I'm sort of coping at the moment, but the reason I'm
emailing is that I'm about to return a Macbook which isn't mine and that
I've been using for the iPhone (albeit every few months when I really
needed to upload a video or pull a set of photos off).  I've so far let
it upgrade its iTunes* if it asks and act as the master sync repository
for the iPhone (original flat silver back, 2G).  

I don't really know anything about iPhone maintenance or MacOS/iTunes.
Because I plan on returning this macbook, which will be wiped, I'm
worried that the iPhone is somehow tied to the copy of iTunes on it.
Worse, I'm worried that if I do something like switch SIMs or manage to
lockup, or semi-brick the iPhone, that I'd need a genuine copy of iTunes
(and so a Windows PC or Mac) to fix it, and presumably/ideally a copy of
this repository so it can fix stuff up correctly and restore from the
last backup.

*This might rule out wine.

I recall reading that a wine developer got iTunes using wine's libusb
support and synced an iPod, but this sounds horrifically bricktastic.  I
guess it would be a way to copy over auth keys and suchlike and retain
the most compatible communication with the phone.

I know a colleague who used an XP VMWare image, which is a bit rubbish
just for iTunes.

So does anyone use any of the above Linux projects?

Thanks;

Damion
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