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.

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.

Now Apple had a keynote event yesterday and among other stuff presented the features of the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0.

This new OS version will provided for the iPad this fall alongside iPhone 3G/3GS and iPod Touches 2G/3G this summer. Developer builds are already available and some videos of the new features like multitasking (technically it’s just an illusion though) already fill up the internet tubes.

With the recent news about libimobiledevice and native Linux support for these devices some important questions rise that i’ll try to answer:

• First of all: Will the iPad blend? Yes it will.
• Will the iPad (using OS 3.2) work with libimobiledevice? Yes it will. We tested access and all tools work as expected. Changes are in GIT and support arrives in the next releases.
• So everything works? Not everything. The iPad uses a “DBVersion 5″ for it’s music database and apparently a new hash algorithm. However, we’re already looking into it and hope to have everything working before iPhone OS 4.0 arrives to keep people syncing fine.
• Will iPhone OS 4.0 be supported by libimobiledevice? Access and tools should work fine. However, the music database hashing has changed with OS 3.2 again. As the OS will also be used on current iPhone and iPod Touch models, libgpod will have to gain support to support the new hashing aswell.
• Is this cat and mouse game never going to stop? In the context of the music database iTunes is managing: It won’t. New features, like those found in iPhone OS 4.0 (mainly for books), require changes to the music database format and new iTunes versions. So whenever something new will be added, things will have to be altered to work. However the basic underlying protocols used by libimobiledevice should remain stable.

If you have more questions just add a comment and i’ll try to add them to the list.

The libimobiledevice preliminary website has also gained a FAQ, especially for those who seem to hit a bug which boils down to ”I can’t sync music to the device but I see it was copied!”. If you don’t have an “iTunes_Control/Device/SysInfoExtended” file on your device’s filesystem you are hitting this bug.

It was just fixed in libgpod 0.7.93 which is released now. For a manual fix just create the “iTunes_Control/Device” directory and run “ipod-read-sysinfo-extended <UUID> <MOUNTPOINT>” which should create a SysInfoExtended file.

Expect a mini-series soon explaining the tools one can use on Linux to access the devices. Although you can already check out a very nice video created by an early tester “masterofabortions” which already shows some of the tools in action. Great work! Mind though, that this is not just Ubuntu specific.

Icon copyright by Hylke Bons, available in the gnome-icon-theme-extras package.

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/

In the recent months most sites talking about the development of browser technology, made us look into a series of graphs to beat each other in performance of the browser’s engine.

Now, this performance race which usually left IE far far far far behind the competition, is obviously not as “ignored” by Microsoft as some people expected.

In the latest post we see graphs of somekind of IE9 development build closing up on the SunSpider Javascript test.

The post also features a stunning mention of the Acid3 standards test where that IE9 version passes with a 32/100 score next to announcing CSS support for rounded corners and plans to use DirectX for hardware accelerated website rendering.

While this in itself looks like “some hope”, IE9 still has to play quite a lot of catch-up as latest trends like HTML5 video/audio/canvas tags apparently not have made it into the development builds.

Let the next browser wars finally begin!

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.

It’s actually quite simple.

First, OpenOffice deals with page styles. If you ever visited one of those cheesy “Office” classes at University or Company your life has probably evolved around using styles and you ditched manual formatting to a very dark place, right?

If not, then it might be worth learning about using styles in your documents asap.

Anyways, open up the “Styles and Formatting” dialog (most likely by pressing F11 or using the “Format” menu) and use the top icons to select the “page styles” view.

Right click onto the styles list and create a new page style. Change the orientation to “Landscape” and add it. Like on my screenshot above, it should now be listed there.

Now we are going to apply the style to a document with three pages. We want the second page to display in landscape mode, while the rest should remain in portrait mode.

Now move your cursor to the last paragraph of the first page and use “Insert > Manual Break”. Select “Page break” and our new “Landscape” style. Oh, nice the page is landscape now, omagad must tell my boss, wife, parents, teacher, lector, dog and ze world!

Well, we are not just there yet. All following pages also now use the “Landscape” style and are also in landscape mode now. This is not what we wanted.

To fix this simply go the last paragraph on the second page and do another “Insert > Manual break”, but this time you choose the “Default” style.

Now let someone rub your back as you have finally made it.

This was done in OpenOffice 3.1.1, but for different versions it should roughly be the same process.

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.