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.

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.

In other news, you might have heard about NVIDIA’s VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) which literally offloads Video decoding and processing to the graphics processor on Unix systems. They introduced it with the 180.06 driver series which you can download at their official site.

Apparently frameworks like ffmpeg/xine and players like mplayer or vlc have or plan to pickup support for it despite it will take a few months to get there. Unfortunately, my framework of  choice which appears to suit best for it, GStreamer (congrats for recent move from cvs to git), has no such efforts yet (and can’t directly profit on an ffmpeg implementation).

The API is only available for NVIDIA graphic cards but quickly checking out the docs today I picked up a line which kind of shows that NVIDIA seems to expect others to pick up…

…

Back-end driver files. These files are located in the standard system (possibly X11-specific) library path.

• libvdpau_%s.so For example:
• libvdpau_nvidia.so
• libvdpau_intel.so
• libvdpau_ati.so

…

Interesting… Too bad ATI and Intel both plan to go with their own implementations of Video acceleration APIs.

Are we going to see a happy end for Video acceleration on Unix?

Current releases of libgpod which is able to handle managing of the iTunes database (this is where your Music/Photo data is stored) on an iPhone or iPod Touch are only able work with the database for firmwares 1.1.4 and below.

This involved recreating a specific hashing algorithm used by iTunes which had been widely in the news.

With iTunes 8 and Apple’s 2.0 firmware, a new hashing algorithm was introduced which made music/photo synchronization with 2.0+ devices not working at all.

The folks have now uncovered that Apple has apparently started to use their FairPlay-DRM to encrypt the iTunes database.

Recently, there has been progress in understanding how the hashing process for 2.0+ firmware looks like and while there is some more work to do the peak research seems to have been passed quoting someone from the private list:

ok it workes with the later address.
and guess what, it worked !!

tmpkey : *****

itunes :      1BEB2BE8EA1D08D1CAFBD89C5CBE50E0
itdb_hash : 1beb2be8ea1d08d1cafbd89c5cbe50e0

good work !

What you see is a prototype implementation (itdb_hash) having generated the same hash iTunes generated for a specific iTunes database.

The day to plug in the iPhone, let HAL recognize it and use Conduit to synchronize Music/Photos, Calendar, Notes, Addressbook or to use GtkPod or other managers for your Music is constantly rising upon us.

Note that you should understand that all this work will make up for software being iTunes independant without the need to jailbreak at all (on all platforms libiphone compiles).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s5EvhHy7eQ[/youtube]

Really nice! I can imagine that you could even project from below a surface instead, effectively getting rid of the “shadows”.

Additionally Petter Hutterer, the man behind the Multi-Pointer X Server project, has recently released an initial version of a Wiimote X input driver (patches are welcome). It will allow you to use the Wiimote as a full blown X input device and controlling your mouse. Might be cool to apply Johnny’s whiteboard idea here.

Looks like I have to go hunting for some nice projector and loads of free time soon…

Update: Oh heck, how could I  forget “lasertraq” a cool solution for Linux which works with a regular webcam/camera instead of the Wiimote but basically allows you to do the same stuff. Heck it even uses the superdupe GStreamer framework!

I like! Below a cool music video from a Chilean group.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=OBSkLfVp2fQ[/youtube]