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.

As a lot of people started to ask if one is still able to synchronize music using libgpod on Linux and if libimobiledevice and related works, I’d like to explain the current state of art here.

First of all, libimobiledevice is working fine, all known devices running a firmware up to iOS 4.0 are supported and can be accessed as usual.

One exception is the backup functionality. As git master of the library also recently gained support of restoring backups using the idevicebackup tool, I should note that this functionality needs an update as the mobilebackup protocol version was bumped and changed.

Now looking at music synchronization for media players which use libgpod (like Amarok, Rhythmbox, GTKPod, gpodder and so on) I can say that it is currently half broken.

However, the positive message I can spread here is that the iTunes music database is still signed using the same hash we already support. This means that we’ll be able to fix this issue in libgpod soon and make it work with less trouble.

On the other hand it is now also clear that the iPad uses a new hash and music synchronization is not working. iOS 4 is not available for that device anyways until later this year.

So to sum it up: Music sync with an iPhone/iPod Touch running iOS 4.0 with Linux is going to work fine soon, while music sync with the iPad is fully unsupported. So you might want to wait with your update until a newer libgpod is released.

An extra goodie for users of the Banshee media player. Alan was so nice to hack libgpod support into Banshee during the Novell Hackweek, thus support for iDevices is coming soon.

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.

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.

Can anyone beat me on that and present older crap? (Only real boxes, manuals, cds/floppys allowed!)

Update 20.08.09: Nikias Bassen sent me in this beautifully designed piece of pure geekness. A shot of his Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 from August ’98 below.

Enjoy!

At least they keep auctions where people advertise their PSP having “the super duper” M33 firmware installed…

Bah! Well, what’s left for me is a shameless plug to the new auction…

Update 28/05/09: Unbelievable, the new auction which I carefully checked to not contain any freaking reference to anything copyright violating has also been removed… Also no clue why as I only received the typical standard “don’t sell illegal copies/backups” E-Mail. Contacted eBay support, let’s see…

It appears though that I am not alone. There are a couple of people having trouble selling their PSP on eBay. However in contrast to my case where I list the original unmodified 1.50 firmware, they had used rather problematic “wording” like “Pandora Battery” or “Custom Firmware/M33″ and alike.

Reply and solution 28/05/09: Great, I have received a polite and exact explaination from the eBay security team. The problem for eBay really was the installed 1.50 firmware on my PSP which is considered “open/hackable to circumvent technical protections” (like copy protection). They recommend installing the latest PSP firmware before selling first.

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 kept your (not jailbroken) bling bling from being accessed on Linux and limited to synchronization with one Mac or Windows computer could soon be history as a new interesting project has been started.

iFuse (along with it’s backend library libiphone) is a project to allow mounting any iPhone or iPod Touch on Linux over the standard USB cable (so far you could only mount jailbroken ones over the network using ssh) using the fuse filesystem abstraction.

For this to work the project is based on a lot of USB traffic reverse engineering of the iTunes protocol stack to talk with the device.

The current state is pretty astounding as they have a working (not 100% stable though) read/write capable implementation and a backend library which can be used in applications to take further use of the device.

More services can be explored and sms/addressbook/calendar access is already in reach (although needs to be implemented).

A testrun with the library showed how young the library actually is and I had to adjust some autofoo to make it compile correctly.

Another issue had been that on openSUSE the iPhone/iPod Touch gets automounted as camera devices and libiphone has reported cryptic errors on attempts to access the device.

The project requires that you generate encryption keys prior to communicating with any device due to the SSL driven protocol layer once for a computer. This corelates to the iTunes limitation that you can only synchronize your bling bling with one library and takes up to a two or three minutes to do.

Upon the first “contact” of your computer and the device, both devices enter a pairing process which is fast and trivial enabling generic communication from that point on.

Using iFuse one can mount the device to some location and it can be used with Linux tools like gtkpod or other media players/managing tools like any other iPods.

The cool thing is now that this will enable you to plug in an out of the box iPhone or iPod Touch to your (or that of your friends) Linux desktop and modify contents on it.

The library is nearing a first release milestone, it is still pretty unstable and needs some more polish but heading a very good way.

Please mind that no Linux media player manager application is able to deal with the iTunes library on your device if you have a 2.0+ version firmware. It might even potentially destroy your iTunes library (not your whole bling, just the music/playlist and so on) if you use it.

I’ll try to package this as soon as we see the first release of this great piece of work.

UPDATE 12/09:

Zach C. on the libiphone mailinglist writes:

Just upgraded, ran iphoneclient on the phone. iPhone firmware 2.1 appears to work out of the box, no code change needed. Business as usual. :)

The library has been tested with the new 2.1 firmware realeased by Apple. It appears to work without problems! Any protocol changes would most likely make devices with older firmwares not work anyway, so Apple has to keep it compatible.