How To Use Your iPhone or iPod Touch With Linux

By Jim on June 24th, 2010

Here are some instructions on how to use your iPhone or iPod Touch with Linux. This is great info for those who enjoy Apple’s mobile devices but who prefer Linux on their desktop.

For quite some time, using your iPhone or iPod Touch on Linux was a challenge. There were two options – jailbreak it, and connect over wifi – this would let you upload and download music, but not much else. Alternatively, you could run a Windows in a VM and do it that way – not really using it with Linux at all really. However, a project libimobiledevice allowing Linux users to use their iPhones on their OS of choice has reached the 1.0.0 release. This doesn’t mean that you can do everything on Linux with the iPhone that you can do with iTunes, but it’s getting there, and the key things are there, namely:

File system access
Music Sync with Rhythmbox or GTKPod
One way PIM (contacts, calendars etc) sync – device -> computer
USB internet tethering
SSH tunneling (if device is jailbroken)
Installing, uninstalling and archiving apps
Manage Springboard

iPhone On Linux