While Apple made a Windows version of iTunes years ago, they still haven’t seen fit to roll out any official syncing solution for our Linux friends. That leaves unofficial solutions, which according to Marcan’s Abort, Retry, Hack? blog, are finally on their way:

• libusb-1.0 provides an advanced API to access USB devices under Linux, replacing the old libusb-0.1 API
• usbmuxd coordinates application access to the device and talks the specific iPhone/iTouch USB protocol
• libiphone implements the Apple-specific protocols that are tunneled through usbmuxd: it can launch services through lockdown, retrieve device info, send notifications, and access the filesystem via AFC.
• iFuse and gvfs-backend-afc both provide access to AFC to regular Linux apps. iFuse does this by mounting via FUSE, while gvfs-backend-afc is obviously a backend for gVFS.
• libgpod (the library that traditionally has managed music databases for iPods) is being extended to support the new SQLite format, the new hash, and also to talk to libiphone to properly put the device in to and out of sync mode.
• Theoretically, actual music players such as Amarok and Rhythmbox will need none or very few modifications to work.

If you’ve got your FOSS-on, and you’re eager to check out this solution, head on over for the details, and then let us know what you think!

[Thanks Brian for the tip!]

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Unofficial iPhone and iPod touch Sync Coming to Linux

[I've mentioned about my crazy Ubuntu using IT friend Anthony Casella a few times before. Several months ago he made the switch from Treo to the iPhone 3G and -- surprise surprise -- he's loving it! Well, almost all of it. Problem is, Apple doesn't make an iTunes for Linux. So what's an open source geek to do? Tinker, of course! Here's Antony's first article on (trying to) use the iPhone with Linux. Are you trying to do the same? If so, let us know what you're doing in the comments! - Rene]

It’s a fabulously well-known fact that Apple has no interest in bringing support for it’s highly popular iPhone to Linux. Perhaps I can go as far as to say is that Linux is to Apple as curd is to eyeball. None the less I have an affinity for the iPhone in spite of the abhorrent treatment I receive being a Linux user. Here are a few ways that you can try to live with this Shakespeareanesque tragedy until such time that Apple sees the error in its ways (ya, right)… after the jump!

By Virtualizing

Although VMware allows for any user to download and install their VMware-server and VMware-player applications free of charge, USB iPhone tethering — as of this writing — is only supported by their for-pay VMware-workstation application ($185, OUCH!). By simply heading to www.vmware.com you can purchase and download the application by filling out their online form. Once installed, you can virtualize your Windows OS of choice (actually, iTunes 8 is only supported by XP SP2 and up), download iTunes and then synchronize, purchase and play music.

The obvious drawback would be that you’d need a Windows installation disk and valid installation key (Well, most of us need this anyway, ahem). Secondly, you are cruising at not-so-blazing-fast USB 1.0 speeds due to a VMware limitation. On top of that is the $189 fee is a non starter for many simply wanting to listen to their tunes. Finally, running a VM of any OS can be a resource hog so going this route, albeit the most feature complete, seems a bit overkill.

By Jailbreaking

For those of you who don’t have an original iPhone 2G and have not upgraded to firmware 2.x, or perhaps simply despise soiling their favorite distro with anything from Microsoft, then there is a Linux-only way to sync your files. The Ubuntu specific “How To” found at the Ubuntu community iPhone site gives you a step by step guide to getting this working using the awesome Amarok music player. I am very aware that Ubuntu != Linux but the guide can tailored to other distros if that is your inclination.

I think it’s easy to see why this is less than optimal. Let’s be honest, iPhone 2G is last gen and missing out on the App store that came with firmware 2.x would royally suck. Frankly, even though a jailbroken iPhone gives me benefits like being able to multitask my ssh client and run a mail app, I can honestly say that I would be missing out on some of my favs like the Google Mobile App (where I feel like I am a Trekkie talking into my communicator waiting for the “Computer” to give me the answer to all my questions), iTunes remote, I.TV and Air Sharing (more about this next).

By Compromising

I’ve found a less intrusive way to synchronize my music, photos and movies than what is employed by the previous two methods. I, like most system administrators, use and am able to function with multiple operating systems. I use Linux at work, Windows and Mac OS X at home. I don’t follow the zealotry of others who find it necessary to keep a pristine mono-OS-culture. This is where the iPhone app Air Sharing (iTunes Link – currently on holiday sale!) comes into play. The app costs $4.99 and can be installed directly onto the iPhone via the App Store. Any song that I have ripped from CD, or any movie I have ripped from DVD, can be loaded onto the iPhone via the Air Sharing application using WebDAV or Bonjour over a wifi network. This lets me store my ripped MP3 music and MP4 videos onto the device.

The thing that differentiates this from some simple USB key is that I can also play these files from within the Air Sharing app if the urge should arise. Once I am at an iTunes capable OS, I then copy the files off of the iPhone via Air Sharing and sync them to iTunes which then places them into my playlists and ultimately on the the iPhone “as Jobs intended.”

As with the other two methods, there are some snags. One of which is that most people may have a problem having to select a new music file to play each time a song ends as the Air Sharing app doesn’t auto play the next item. The biggie of course is that DRM’d files that you want to place into Air Sharing for transfer to your linux box will NOT play on said linux box (via any legal means). That’s DRM for you.

Conclusion

Let’s face it, none of these are ideal. Until iTunes is reversed engineered or perhaps Jobs allows for even a WINE enabled installation a la Picasa2, we Linux users will have to continue to rely on our resourcefulness to get the full benefits of our iPhones.

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3 Ways to (Try and) Get the iPhone to Work with Linux

Remember that story about the iPhone almost having run Linux as its OS? Well, some enterprising young hackers have now gotten it doing just that — the Linux Kernel at least, via tether.

No touch control yet, no writing to the actual device, but first steps are first steps, and no doubt other hackers everywhere are already drooling at the possibility…

Or shaking their heads and wondering about Linux’s near obsessive need to notch its bedpost with every device on the planet.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Linux Kernel Running on the iPhone

Daring Fireball has been digging into the saga of Tony Fadell, the “Father of the iPod” who’s left Apple, potentially to be replaced by Mark Papermaster (if they can get around IBM’s lawyers, that is).

What’s been turned up?

The iPhone’s software is overseen by Scott Forstall (Senior Vice President, iPhone Software), and, at a technical level, Bertrand Serlet (Senior Vice President, Software Engineering). There is no such division between hardware and software with the traditional (pre-Touch) iPods. The story I’ve heard is that at the outset of Apple’s iPhone initiative, there was a heated debate within Apple as to what OS should be used. Forstall and Serlet pushed for using OS X. Fadell (and, according to one source, former Apple executive Steve Sakoman) pushed for using something else.1 Obviously, Forstall and Serlet won this debate, and, hyperbolic though it may sound, it may prove to be the single best early design decision in the entire history of the company. It seems hard to imagine the iPhone any other way now, but at the outset it was not a foregone conclusion that a stripped down and revamped version of OS X would work for a mobile phone.

And the OS Fadell is rumored to have wanted to use instead?

Linux.

Needless to say, harnessing the already tremendous effort and technology behind OS X for their mobile wireless platform seems wicked-obvious in hindsight, as is avoiding the fragmentation of resources and focus that introducing a third OS (counting the already embedded iPod OS) would entail. However, the choice to go with OS X seems to have marginalized Fadell, taking him from the man behind Apple’s music success, to the man behind the times on Apple’s next great success, the iPhone.

And, hey, Linux eventually found a home on Android anyway!

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The iPhone Almost Ran… Linux?!

When I say the King is dead, I don’t mean that the 680 is a bad device, or that there’s no reason to use Palm OS, or that anyone that uses it is dumb. Far from it, I think the 680 is pretty high up on my list. It’s still a good phone. If I thought Palm OS was dumb or not relevant, I wouldn’t do the TreoCentral TreoCast. It boils down to two things with Palm OS: the hardware and the software. The hardware will see updates. There will probably be more Palm OS GSM phones to come out. Better cameras, 3G, smaller form factors, the whole shebang. When it comes out, it will probably be a compelling upgrade for Palm OS users. But I don’t think we’ll see a significant software update for Palm OS in the next two years. While some may accuse that it’s unfair to say “the king is dead” alluding to Palm OS, it’s not accurate to say the king is alive, either. But still, there are always these persistent rumors about faked deaths and random sightings…

680 Hardware

It’s a bit of a shame that the 680 was what we ended up reviewing; Palm, for unknown reasons, tends to do all of their innovation on CDMA before they do anything new for GSM. Palm’s Centro is actually a pretty neat phone, ,and it bodes well for what they’ll be introducing in the future. The 680, though only a year old, doesn’t seem to age quite the way that one would like. Two of the other phones in the Smartphone Round Robin are very nice and svelte — the iPhone and the BlackBerry Curve — and the other, though brickish, is packed with features like 3G, wi-fi, and GPS. The 680 seems paltry by comparison in many areas.

Palm can do better than they did with the 680; the Centro is proof of that. But Palm only releases a couple of phones per year, and we probably won’t see anything to replace the 680 on the GSM side of things for another few months at least. This leaves the Treo 680 dated in terms of features.

If you’re on CDMA, there’s at least the option of the Treo 755P and the Palm Centro. Those two phones are technologically advanced, at least moreso than the 680. The 680 shipped with a VGA camera, almost criminally obsolete for a smartphone. What makes it worse is that it fixed a color balance problem the preceding 650 had. A lot of people thought the 680 was what the 650 should have been. I don’t agree with that assessment, I think Palm traditionally innovates along a path — they’ve chosen a form factor, and they’ll continue to refine it. You could even say that they started the form factor, or at least popularized it when they invented their Palm Pilot.

The thing about Palm is that they’ve been the market leader before. They know what it’s like to be on top, and they probably have a good idea of what they have to do in terms of engineering to get back there. They’d probably like to engineer a few things away; they’ve been humbled a bit by other device makers — for example, the iPhone really showed a lot of people what a smartphone could really be capable of doing. But Palm has to wrangle with some inherent limitations. The biggest one is their software, Palm OS.

Software-Constrained

Because of the way it was written back in the day, Palm OS doesn’t allow more than 2 radios at the same time. There are a lot of useful radios that go into a feature-packed cell phone. Of course, the integral radio transmitter is the cell antenna, which handles such things like phone calls, GPRS, EDGE, 3G, 1xRTT, or EV-DO. The first choice is pretty much made.

The second choice, that gets tough. Bluetooth requires a separate radio. Wi-fi requires a separate radio. For all I know, GPS requires a separate radio (in terms of how Palm OS would deal with it). Wi-Max requires a separate radio. If the new 700MHz wireless block gets bought by Google and they unveil a new, cheap-as-in-free wireless network, that will require a separate radio. Everyone can pick as many radios as they can stuff into a little metal and plastic candybar/brick shape and go from there. Palm can pick two radios altogether, and the die is cast: they have to have a cell radio (1) and they chose bluetooth (2). End of story. They could fix it, but they’re not going to.

680 Software

Okay, that transition was unnecessarily negative. Palm OS has a ton of strengths. In a lot of ways, Palm OS has more strengths than some of the other platforms out there — their software is pretty easy to use, there are a ridiculous amount of 3rd party apps, and a large and vocal community dedicated to the platform. What good is integrated GPS if you have to dig into arcane COM ports before you can use it? But, there are some revolutions coming in the mobile phone world, and PalmOS, as it stands now, is equipped to miss them. Without wi-fi, the likelihood of using a PalmOS phone for VOIP calls is unlikely, for example. And Palm’s mindshare and marketshare is slipping more and more with every passing year.

Once Palm finishes their next-generation Linux operating system the situation will be different. At that point, Palm may leapfrog everybody out there. Palm has licensed their operating system before, they may again. However, the last time they did license, they spun off their software division so the hardware and software sides of Palm didn’t have any inherent advantage in working with each other. That led to a lot of hassles for Palm in the long run and they’re probably not likely to repeat the same mistakes.

The bummer of it is that I think Palm is more constrained by their software than anyone else in the Smartphone Round Robin. Sure, the software on the Curve isn’t all that advanced, but it’s plenty stable and designed to do a much smaller subset of functions than the 680 — people don’t really expect as much, and RIM’s OS gets better and better with each passing day. And since Palm wasn’t able to sell the enterprise on the necessity of a touchscreen for smartphones, well… they lost a lot of customers.

The operating system on the 680 is both enabling and limiting — once the software is on the device, there’s a lot of things you can do. I have this feeling that it takes Palm a lot of work to get PalmOS on hardware in the first place. I could easily be wrong about this, but when I think about getting PalmOS on a device, I think about bolted-on compatibility libraries designed to run a bunch of code that was done in assembly for a different chip architecture. To give an analogy, the PalmOS is kind of like building something by hand. The iPhone, Curve, and Tilt operating systems would be more like building a something with robots on an assembly line.

Looking to the future?

Now I’ll move on to what might be the toughest thing about the 680. Palm is done with the Palm OS. They don’t want to put too much development effort into it as I stated in the earlier article. They probably wont’ be buying some neato Palm OS widget and bolting it on as a cosmetic upgrade. It’s not worth it to them; it’s more important to get their Linux OS out the door faster. Unfortunately, that’s probably the right thing to do in their case.

They’ll probably have some sort of compatibility layer that runs the compatibility layer that runs the old dragonball assembly so that most of the old Palm OS apps run on the new Linux OS. They have all the rights they could possibly need for this due to a licensing-rights and code-ownership settlement with the seemingly-incompetent software company that used to be part of Palm that Palm perhaps mistakenly spun off and maybe wanted to buy back but was bought by Access instead. Are you confused? Yes? Good, then you’re halfway there. Actually, you’ve probably pretty much got it covered. It was a debacle; the important thing is that whatever it was, it happened and it’s behind Palm now. They can focus on the future, and they’re now essentially doing so now with steely-eyed determination.

The Foleo could’ve been a good indication of what they’re planning except for the fact that they revealed that the Foleo wasn’t based off their next-gen Linux system. Palm was tight-lipped about the Foleo before it was introduced; they’ll probably be tight-lipped about their new Linux OS will be too. We don’t know what it will look like; we don’t know how much it will build off of the current Palm OS. We don’t know if they’ll keep the interface similar; we don’t know if they’re going to blow everyone away with how awesome it is, we don’t know when it will be out. We don’t know if they can keep it a secret. We don’t know if they’re going to copy Apple or leapfrog them. No one knows, but you ask me, Palm is definitely the wild card in this race.

Snapped Back to the Present

In the meantime, we have the Treo 680. It’s a good phone. My wife uses my old 680, and will continue to use it until the next iPhone comes out. I’ll probably buy that new iPhone because Palm’s next-generation Linux OS won’t be available yet and it’ll be my duty as an iPhone blogger. She’ll gripe about the money I’m spending but I’ll ameliorate her disquietude by giving her my current iPhone and her orange 680 will be gifted to whomever in our family or friends is on GSM and needs something more advanced than their current featurephone. The 680 will still be perfectly functional, and there will be a bunch of software they can use with it as long as they’re comfortable with having a HotSync ID of mike.

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Round Robin: Palm OS, The King is Dead

Mr. Fired-From-Disney Himself

First on the list is Michael Eisner, who blames Jobs and iTunes for the Writer’s strike, of all things. He claims that Apple has ruined the download model for everybody, and that only Apple makes any money. Everyone else is begging for crackers at lunch. Yeah, right.

The studios make deals with Steve Jobs, who takes them to the cleaners,” Eisner said.

“They make all these kinds of things, and who’s making money? Apple! They should get a piece of Apple. If I was a union, I’d be striking up wherever he is.

Eisner further predicts that online media won’t make any money for another three years. Unless you’re Apple, that is. If you’re Apple, online media is making money now.

LG Introduces the QZ-6%7g#!

I tend to avoid posting news of “iPhone killers” because it’s just not going to be true. There are some companies that have a shot at making an iPhone killer, but they’re years away. I think Palm could do it for example, but we won’t find out for another year or two. Apple probably doesn’t have to worry about that one for a while.

And in the “don’t have to worry about it now” category, LG introduced a phone that looks like an iPhone in Europe. I hate to say it, but no one will be excited about the Prada-esque outer stylings of the LG phones until LG can drink in some user interface design mojo. Can you remember to get excited about something called the LG-KS20? I doubt it, though I bet its existence makes Dieter happy.

A Coalition of the Aimless

I know that Google’s new linux smartphone operating system Android is supposed to be big news, but I can’t help it: I don’t think it is, and I don’t think it will be. There are already a bunch of linux smartphone systems where all the driver work is done and all you have to worry about is the user interface customization. I checked out the websites of the companies that are part of the Android consortium, and I hate to say it but their UI work appears to be featurephone-based and pretty busy. Not that I’m a UI expert, but still, I know that a clean interface is better than a cluttered one.

There’s already a bunch of people doing this, and some of them have a phone out now that does everything already: OpenMoko, QTopia, Access Linux Project, and Palm will probably join this list perhaps a year after Android is actually released. But look at the list of companies in their press release: none of them have shipped their own mainstream user interface before except for Nokia. And I don’t think that it’s in Nokia’s best interests to succeed too much in this venture at the cost of their Symbian S60. I wish them all success, but I think success is a tall order.

No One is Panicking

I’m glad to see that all of the other smartphone makers are all confident that they’ll be able to beat the iPhone, or that they’re at least not panicking about it. If you want a list of how other companies are mimicking the iPhone form factor, the BBC has put together a list of the heavyweights.

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CEOs Fiddle

Google has announced Android, an open source Linux operating system designed to be very customizable by programmers. This isn’t the GPhone, the long-rumored Google Phone. Google is not making any of the actual phones, just the software. Android joins the ranks of myriad Linux development attempts: the new pro-sumer Palm OS, Access Linux Platform, Trolltech’s QTopia, OpenMoko, and others in Asia that are unknown to me.

I don’t know if this one will be more successful than the others, and they haven’t announced what it looks like, or what it will do. They just announced the software license and that it exists, or that it should in late 2008… but expect a bunch of publicity all over the place anyway. What I do know is that this effort will have a lot of money behind it.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Google Phone: Android