While the IPhone is very nice telephone and has very good ActiveSync support, it lacks basic Linux support at all.
Using Ubuntu Jaunty and having updated the IPhone to it's latest version 3.0, I'm unable to use the IPhone as mp3 player(as I can't upload new music to the IPhone) or digital camera(as I can't download newly made images from the IPhone). This limits to IPhone to just a phone.
(K)Ubuntu Jaunty was able to detect the IPhone when plugged into the usb connector, but was unable to download any images.
After spending some more time on this issue, I finally found the homepage of
libiphone. libiphone is a software library that talks the native Apple USB protocols that the iPhone uses. They provide native packages for Jaunty and it seems like the packages will also be available for Karmic directly from the Ubuntu archives.
After following the install instructions from their website for Ubuntu, I'm able to import images directly into Digikam now. I just made a minor change to the udev rules, to make access to the images available also for normal users, as the default configuration makes the usb devices available to root:root only.
Just append
, GROUP"audio"
to any line in /etc/udev/rules.d/89-libiphone.rules, to make the usb devices available to any member of the group audio. After you have changed the file you need to restart hald by running
/etc/init.d/hal restart
Maybe some day I will be able to also update my music collection on the IPhone, which would make the IPhone the perfect device.
