This is a tip sent by WebUpd8 reader Stone Cut, on extracting images and text from PDF files. It's different from his previous tip and useful for other cases.

One more interesting thing you can do with the packages we installed in our previous iPhone article is to backup the music on your iPhone / iPod Touch back onto a computer again, for example, after a PC crash that rendered your hard disk with your music collection useless. This is not possible with iTunes if the new PC account hadn't been activated before. However, this procedure will only work for non-DRM'ed files.

In order for tethering to work, your iPhone must actually have the tethering option enabled. This depends on your network carrier and contract. For iPhone 3.0 OS you can also just install a so-called mobileconfig profile which enables tethering, but this in a gray zone legally. For later firmwares your iPhone additionally needs to be jailbroken and a system file patched which is surely not everybody's thing. Anyway, with that out of the way let's get to the actual setup.

The following tutorial will explain how to extract all text from PDFs (including text in images), by using a combination of Ghostscript and a command line OCR tool called tesseract-ocr. This is yet another guest post by StoneCut.


First we need to convert our PDF to individual image files (TIFF) so we can then OCR-scan them again. We need Ghostscript for that. It's probably already installed on your system but just to be sure you can run:

StoneCut continues his series of posts for WebUpd8. In his last 2 posts he explained how to sync your iPhone / iPod Touch with various music players in Ubuntu and also the current status for Linux music players and iPhone / iPod Touch sync:

Easy Way To Sync Your iPhone With Rhythmbox, Nautilus, Etc. In Ubuntu

Reviews Of iPhone/iPod Synchronizing Applications For Linux


Today, StoneCut gives you some tips for audio and video tagging for iPhone / iPod Touch under Linux. Read on!

All of these require a working setup with ifuse, gvfs, libimobiledevice (aka libiphone) etc as per our previous article. In today's article, StoneCut reviews GTKpod, Rhythmbox, Banshee and Songbird and their current status regarding iPhone/iPod syncing.

Like WebUpd8 reader StoneCut said in a comment on it's previous tip, he wrote yet another post for iPhone owners which use Linux. So here it is:

In our previous tutorial we showed how you to access the iPhone OS 3.x filesystem and read/write to its music database using iFuse and by compiling our own libgpod4. Then we had to create a file on the iPhone, manually mount the phone each time and so on. Maybe a bit complicated for an average user.

However, there is now a lot easier way using GVFS which will automount your iPhone for syncing with Rhythmbox, for example. And you don't need to compile anything anymore. It works for Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid (only Karmic tested). The required PPA does not carry any packages for Jaunty, sorry.

Thanks to StoneCut, here is yet another iPhone tip for Web Upd8 readers. After StoneCut's absolutely amazing post on Mounting Your iPhone On A Fresh Ubuntu Karmic Koala Installation (The Complete Guide), today he sent us another great tip: a Nautilus script for SCP transfers that he uses to quickly copy files to his iPhone and might be very useful for some Web Upd8 readers.

Here is the script:

We wrote a quick guide on how to mount your Ipod / iPhone in Ubuntu but that was for Jaunty. Also, it seems that's not working for everyone. So Web Upd8 reader StoneCut wrote a complete (see this huge comment) how-to, for mounting your iPhone on a "virgin" (fresh install) Ubuntu Karmic Koala and I decided to post it here so more people would be able to find it (thank you, StoneCut).


First off, apply all available system updates for Karmic Koala:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Now, let's get started !

Open a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and type this:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Add this at the end:

## Custom sources for iFuse and other iPhone stuff
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonabeck/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonabeck/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

Save and exit.

Get Repo Key and install iFuse and Utils via Terminal:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com F0876AC9
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ifuse
sudo apt-get install libiphone-utils iproxy

Also reload UDEV rules with the new device rules in a terminal (you can do a reboot to be sure, too):