iPhone Syncing w/ Ubuntu

The best way to do it? Don't.

There are more than a couple different methods out there, all of which require you to jailbreak the phone (since there is no 'disk mode' for iPhones), which isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, once jailbroken, the asshattery begins.

All the methods say "Sync Wirelessly!" which sounds sexy, but it isn't. The over-the-wifi is the only way you'll have any hope of syncing, which is intolerably slow when you start thinking about sending gigs of music. To make matters worse, it seems like most guides want you to sync over sshfs, which means nicely encrypted transfers... which are very CPU intensive, for a small processor like that in the iPhone. So if the Wifi wasn't slow enough for you, the ciphering will be.

So music was frustrating to sync, so I skipped to the more important things (I can always listen to Pandora) and came back to it later.

What about pictures? Well they work the same way, except there's no real easy way to have it happen automatically. And just like the music, it's intolerably slow to sync over wifi. Solution? Picasa Web Albums. Google has optimized the web albums page for iPhone, so it's pretty, quick, and easy to use. Done. I upload my stuff there and I can then show it off wherever I am thanks to 3G.

What about Contacts? This one was important to me... and there's a lot of solutions out there, probably one of the more interesting ones is scheduleworld.com, which uses open source software to sync with just about anything. As I was setting that up, though, I felt like it was horribly redundant- scheduleworld.com was going to end up holding a copy of my contacts, acting like the master repository, when I already have one of those. Gmail. So I went looking for a native iPhone <=> Gmail syncing application, and I found several. The one I ended up with is a bit clunky but free, perhaps later I'll get the cheap ($2.99) Sync in a Blink which seems to have glowing reviews. Going direct to the source makes me feel warm and fuzzy, go betweens suck.

Google contacts is worth a little more discussion. It's a relatively new API so adoption is still happening. But wow, it's got a ton of potential. My Linux mail client is talking straight to my Google Contacts, and now my iPhone is syncing with them, directly. Talk about two things which shouldn't be able to sync with a public service... This is gonna catch on and be pretty popular, and it's yet another reason to set a very secure Google account password.

Calendars carry much the same story but at the moment they are much less important to me- as I honestly don't have an accurate calendar. I did enough work to make sure I could have syncing calendars, and while I found several solutions I didn't really decide on one. GCALDaemon is a likely choice though.

So, back to music. I solved that problem, too. It's called a MobiBlu Cube, which I bought some years back essentially because some guy on G4 TV told me to. It's wicked cool, I've enjoyed it, but honestly I haven't gotten much use out of it. So, now that my car is outfitted with an Aux input, perhaps I will. It works just fine with Linux.

So- the moral is the first line. Most of what you need you can get over-the-air on the iPhone. If you can't get it over the air, then don't get it. It's not worth the hassle. And, ironically but expectedly, the iPhone's defining feature- being an iPod - is what makes it unusable with Linux.

Of course that's not explicitly true. It is entirely possible to use a classic iPod with Linux, provided you can put it in Disk Mode so that Linux can access the file system directly. That's an understandable requirement... but the iPhone and iPod touch don't have Disk Mode.

I don't know why they don't have Disk Mode, but I have some theories. I know it probably came as a requirement from the cell phone world to keep the devices from being used in manners inconsistent with the terms of service. Or, perhaps just as likely, pressure from the recording industry to limit access to playback devices to make it more difficult to use open music management programs and stores (Yes, there are DRM free music stores out there). There is the possibility that the idea to turn off Disk Mode came from an internal Apple source... because it effectively locks the music in the device to iTunes. Considering how Apple accounts for the iPhone (they are sold at a loss) and perhaps even the iPod touch (which could be being sold at a loss also) you would want to restrict your users to iTunes just to make sure they have the Chance to buy music from you.

No matter what the reason... I didn't buy an iPhone to use it as a music player, and it looks like I won't be using it as a music player.