For the GNOME Desktop, the file-manager does not display thumbnails of the images nor do those preview with the eog image-viewer.

Jan Dudek had stepped up and wrote gdk-pixbuf-psd. This is a pixbuf loader which enables all GNOME applications to display PSD files.

However this project never had an official release and it appears distributions did not pick this nice feature up.

He also stopped working on the project.

Therefore I took the sources, added a proper build system, packaged it for openSUSE and created a first release of gdk-pixbuf-psd 0.1.0 for download.

The loader handles:

• RGB and CMYK images
• RLE compression
• 8 and 16 bit color depths

Perhaps now some distributions are going to pick this up for their base installations now…

I am sorry for this, but even if it might surprise some people, sometimes there are more important things in life than keeping your blog updated.

Anyways here a quick overview of things that changed or matter before I get bugged at writing again:

• GNOME3 has been released. Congratulations!

• Removed my evolution-status-icon work, there is now evolution-tray which does the job (authors didn’t knew I had this done, too).
• openSUSE 11.4 is released and along with compiz 0.9.4, GNOME 2.32, NVIDIA drivers and subpixel hinting enabled it is just awesomely freaking nice.
• Bought a Vertex-2 64GB SSD to use as a system drive. Superb to speedup a system dramatically.
• Loads of changes on the libimobiledevice front:
  • Released 1.0.6 stable for iOS 4.3+ compatibility. iOS 4.3 has a bug we needed to add a workaround for…
  • libplist fixes a few serious bugs, so be sure to grab the latest 1.4.
  • New idevicedate tool now allows to sync the iDevice time with your computer. Simply run “idevicedate -c” and that’s it.
  • Christoph Fergeau (libgpod maintainer) created the first non-iTunes tool to push contacts on an iDevice using native protocols!
  • “iTunes File Sharing” is now supported. It means that you can add port 3 to the URI (e.g.: afc://<uuid>:3/) in nautilus and with the latest GVFS you get a list of apps supporting file sharing and you can access the documents folders directly. Of course this works with ifuse using the new “–appid” command line argument aswell.
• libimobiledevice 1.2.0 is in the works:
  • New Cython Python bindings are being merged now.
  • idevicebackup4, the backup and restore tool for iOS 4+ is working. Needs some polish though before being merged.
• Wrote a Python plugin for Totem to act as an AirPlay receiver. Just pushed changes to make it work for iOS 4.3+ devices, too.
• Want to view thumbnails of Photoshop PSD files in nautilus and previews in eog, gthumb or whatever else uses “GDK Pixbufs“? I updated the loader written by Jan Dudek as he basically stopped maintaining it and added a proper build system and tagged a 0.1.0 release to get this into distros. I’ll try to package it soon.
• Also changes in my openSUSE repositories:
  • Removed a lot of old cruft and obsolete packages.
  • Added an ideviceinstaller package to my iPhone support repositories.
  • Added openSUSE 11.4 build targets which you should update to as those fix a serious bug connecting to iDevices.
• Successfully compiled and tested the Cherokee Webserver on an Apple TV 2 running PHP. Heck, it’s fast. Plenty of ideas spawn in my head how to make use of this tiny $99 low-energy gem now. I’ll try to write up some howto on this once I got WordPress and other Web 2.0 animals running.

• mod_macro for Apache is very helpful if you are used to a load of copy/paste <VirtualHost/> entries.
• Was mentioned in the German c’t Magazin Issue 2/2011 in an article about libimobiledevice, nice!
• Turned 30. No comment on that.
• Loads of work and business projects right now.

More happened but I simply forgot to mention it now.

Since those reports appear to point out that  Ubuntu/Linux is “teh evil”, I’ll try to explain why this is totally false information and FUD.

The basic workflow he pointed out was:

• Set a passcode on a device
• Switch off the device
• Attach it to an Ubuntu system it was never attached before
• The device starts booting
• Ubuntu automounts the device media partition and allows access

The expected behavior is that the device would refuse to pair with the unknown system due to having a passcode set.

Now the problem here is that you can replicate this flaw with any operating system.

Both Windows and Mac OS X are affected by the same issue and repeating this process under those systems replicates the exact same issue and once attached, allows device access with tools like iPhone Explorer just fine even with a passcode set.

It has nothing to do with Linux except that it became evident here first since Ubuntu auto-mounts any device as soon as it is ready. The guys at libimobiledevice could not replicate it initially as it only affects devices with a long boot cycle.

To sum it up: Ubuntu Linux as well as other Linux distributions, using libimobildevice, do work correctly. The real bug is hidden within the iPhone OS and is thus unrelated to the used operating system as iTunes is evidently affected by this, too. This is something Apple is most likely going to fix in the next OS release, hopefully correcting only this misbehavior which, on Linux, should give you the dialog seen on the picture for this post in the future.

So please stop spreading FUD that Ubuntu/Linux is “hacking your phone”. Thanks.

Oh, and I’d like to dedicate the dialog you see above to Bernd which we are about to introduce to GNOME’s GVFS now just to show that indeed even Linux detects and shows information about a passcode refusal similar to what iTunes shows just fine. ;)

UPDATE 02/06/10: It appears the issue only applies if you switch the device off during an “unlocked” state (thus you entered the passcode already and see the icons) but not if you power it down while it requests you to enter a passcode making this whole mess less dramatic…

Back last year I wrote a simple plugin for Evolution. The plugin provides a small notification area icon to show/hide/quit Evolution’s windows and comes handy if you have your favourite PIM open all the time.

Development work on Evolution broke the functionality though which was based on a hacky workaround anyways (abused a private exported symbol) to be able to hide/show the main window.

However with Evolution 2.30.0, it’s rewrite of the UI code and removal of libbonobo code, the public API changed and now allows much better control of the whole interface.

So without much fanfare I release evolution-statusicon 1.0.4 for Evolution 2.30.0 or later. Download and sources after the break.

Again, this won’t go upstream due to violation of the GNOME HIG; same for Pidgin, Banshee, Liferea, Network Manager and so on, you know?

Check out the right version to install for your openSUSE version here.

The repository with packages for openSUSE 11.2 and Factory can be found here:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/FunkyM:/evolution/

The source and tarballs live at:
http://cgit.sukimashita.com/evolution-statusicon.git/

Enjoy crowding your notification area with this!

Not tested with the indicator applet stuff from Ubuntu, but patches are always welcome.

libimobiledevice is a free open source software library that talks the protocols to support iPhone ® and iPod Touch ® devices natively on Linux.

Unlike other projects, it does not depend on using any existing proprietary libraries and does not require jailbreaking.

It was successfully tested with the iPhone and iPod Touch 1G, 2G, 3G and 3GS models running up to firmware 3.1.3.

So what does it mean for me as a desktop user?

It means you can sync your music/video, access the filesystem from your Linux Desktop, manage your SpringBoard, managed installed apps, create backups and a lot more; all without violating your warranty. Finally more freedom to use the bling bling device on Linux after one was forced to use iTunes on Windows or Mac OS X.

What does this mean for developers?

Developers are able to write applications for Linux which use the native capabilities provides by those devices. As we have successfully tested the library on Mac OS X and Windows aswell during development, other projects might take advantage of this in the future, aswell.

Wow, whom to thank for this?

Big thanks to Matt Colyer who started all this back in August 2007 and provided the first code to “talk” to the devices.

Further credits to all the nice developers of libimobiledevice who continuously worked hard to push code into various libraries (GVFS, libgpod/gtkpod, libusb 1.0) and are mostly responsible that plugging in an iPhone or iPod Touch and syncing your music is fun now. Thanks to the packagers of the various distributions who helped to upstream patches and helped to find bugs.

Contrary to a range of blog posts around the net, Ubuntu and Canonical Ltd. have nothing to do with the work. They just happen to have included the library in the recent Ubuntu Lucid release causing “OMG, suddenly my iPhone works!” reactions. Also this work has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc.

So what happens now?

With this release I will be taking over maintainership for the library from Matt Colyer. We are going to continue to implement more of the left spots, especially the contacts/calendars/notes/bookmarks synchronization capabilities in order to be able to use the device as a fully fledged smartphone and media player with Linux. We won’t touch any DRM infested areas (thus don’t expect to sync any content bought from the iTunes Store) but continue to apply legal methods when implementing the remaining functionality.

Most distributions will feature the library in their next release: Ubuntu Lucid, Fedora 13, openSUSE 11.3 and Mandriva 2010.1 are among those who are more or less confirmed. There are also some backports available from the official site mentioned above for older distributions.

I will be doing a mini-feature here to present each of the various features the library offers in detail soon, so stay subscribed!

Where do I get more information and the library/tools?

Get the full information overload from the official website: http://www.libimobiledevice.org/

The icon is courtesy of Jonathan Zuniga under CC2.5.

For a hint click to read more of the post…

http://www.libimobiledevice.org/

Just recently the popular instant messenger Pidgin joined the ranks with their 2.6 release which introduced A/V chat for Jabber (XMPP) users.

However, finally it looks like there will be a decent way on Linux to have A/V chat with the very popular MSN protocol!

As announced by Guillaume Desmottes, Telepathy, the framework behind the instant messaging client Empathy, has now finally gained support for Audio/Video chat using MSN!

Apart from that he mentions that file transfer and offline messaging support is also done and being merged.

Total awesomeness on the internets.

Telepathy/Empathy is part of the next GNOME Desktop release thus these changes are expected to hit the next cycle of distribution releases.

Nautilus/GVFS:

…

Conduit:

Hey, it’s not even jailbroken! Plug in and use any iPhone/iPod Touch (1G, 2G, 3G, 3GS) up to and including firmware 3.0. Go figure!

Packages for openSUSE will be ready once a proper release is out.

Source Git repositories are available here:

• libplist: http://github.com/JonathanBeck/l…
• usbmuxd: http://pims.selfip.net/git/usbmuxd
• libiphone: http://github.com/MattColyer/lib…
• iFuse: http://github.com/MattColyer/ifu…
• python-iphonesync: http://cgit.sukimashita.com/pyth…
• gvfs-backend-afc: http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gvfs (Update 4/11/09: Now upstream in GVFS)

Credits to a couple of very intelligent people for starting all this. Icon from Jonathan Zuniga under CC2.5.

Since upgrading to the latest openSUSE 11.1 release I felt it was missing badly on my desktop.

It had to be compiled within the Evolution source due to non-public header usage (e-shell stuff) which led to some problems packaging it or even distributing it outside of the main Evolution release.

Today tough, I managed to fix the requirements to compile it as a standalone EPlugin quite easily and thus pumped out a release plus corresponding packages for openSUSE.

The plugin provides a small notification area icon to show/hide/quit Evolution’s windows and comes handy if you have your favourite PIM open all the time.

This won’t go upstream due to violation of the GNOME HIG; same for Pidgin, Banshee, Liferea, Network Manager and so on, you know?

Check out the right version to install for your openSUSE version here.

The new repository for openSUSE can be found here:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/FunkyM:/evolution/

The source lives at:
https://svn.sukimashita.com/repos/evolution-statusicon/trunk/.

Enjoy crowding your notification area with this!

What do you do though when you download it in Linux and want to look into it?

Yes, you put on your googlz and find that most people refer that you can mount that stuff using the loop device thing.

# mount -t hfsplus -o loop iphone_sdk_final.dmg /mnt
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail  or so

Bah, doesn’t work.

# file iphone_sdk_final.dmg
iphone_sdk_final.dmg: VAX COFF executable not stripped

This appears to be a new kind of “.dmg” format which is probably compressed and in order to access it we have to process it a bit…

Let’s check the web for some nice tools, one is dmg2img a converter to create a general hfsplus image out of this file, the other is xar an archiver which Mac OS X is using a lot to extract further files within the bundles.

I have added those tools to my openSUSE 11 repository which is now split into a generic one and a GNOME specific one. Update your sources!

Unfortunately dmg2img did process and create an img file, however it could not be mounted and seemed corrupted…

Anyone with further advice on this?

Of course I have Macs and am able to open it, but I want to be able to do it in Linux.

In other news today, Firefox 3.1+ is gaining native support for the free and open OGG audio/video format! Could this be the final turnover that the OGG format needs to gain wide user margin? Let’s hope so…