If you've recently upgraded to iOS4 (now 4.2) and use Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, you can see your photos in Nautilus, but you have no access to your music using Rhythmbox or GTKPod (the device shows up but quickly disappears). However, you can easily get it to work using the instructions below.


Important: WebUpd8 reader rkv reports that the below instructions work with iPhone 3GS (using iOS 4.2) and the music he transfers shows up on his iPhone, while a friend who has tested this on an iPod Touch 4G says the device now shows up in Rhythmbox but the files he transfers don't show up on his iPod, so it seems this doesn't work for iPhone / iPod Touch 4G!

A recent message on the Ubuntu One mailing list announces that Canonical has teamed up with Funambol, an established software stack that synchronizes thousands of mobile phones and other devices who have built a community around different client plugins, virtually supporting the majority of the existing software on all platforms that have contacts (Thunderbird, Outlook, Mac OS X Mail, etc).

libimobiledevice is a FOSS software library that talks the protocols to support iPhone ® and iPod Touch ® devices on Linux. Unlike other projects, it does not depend on using any existing proprietary libraries and does not require jailbreaking.

When we posted an article named "Ubuntu 10.04 supports iPhone / iPod Touch out of the box", it was actually libimobiledevice (and usbmuxd/gtkpod) who made this possible, not Ubuntu (thanks to Karl for mentioning this).

libimobiledevice (formerly known as libiphone) development started in 2007 and today it hits the first stable version: 1.0.0 and was followed by the release of usbmuxd 1.0.3. The result is that now you can say that in fact "Linux supports iPhone / iPod Touch out of the box!". Most distributions will feature the library in their next release. For now, the following have confirmed using libimobiledevice: Ubuntu Lucid (for Ubuntu Karmic, see THIS), Fedora 13, openSUSE 11.3 and Mandriva 2010.1.

This is a follow up on our "Confirmed: Ubuntu 10.04 Supports iPhone / iPod Touch Out Of The Box" post (the initial post has been updated also). I just wanted to write the update in a new post so the credits go to whom deserves them.


Thanks to Karl , we find out that the iPhone / iPod Touch support in Ubuntu 10.04 is in no way thanks to Canonical: