[Gllug] iPhone syncing

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Thu, 19 Aug 2010, damion.yates at gmail.com wrote:

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

None of you?
 
> 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 now also won an iPad, a mate had to activate this, which took less
than one second of usb communication, it's never seen a mac/pc since as
it can self install stuff.

> 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.

I've learnt that this is the case and now taken backups of ~/Music on
the old mac.

> 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?

I've had no responces at all, does this means that none of you have an
iDevice?  Or that all of you that do are using MacOS or Windows?

Damion
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