Steve Reads

With the help of my inestimable friend mrz, I have gotten iTunes to sync properly with an iPhone from within Linux. It works flawlessly. Here’s what I did:

• Install VMWare Workstation 6.x. I tried with 5.x and had not much luck. In fact I believe when I first installed VMWare on this laptop, I had installed VMWare Server. I had even tried the variant of VMWare Server which uses a web GUI; I cannot testify strongly enough against it. Moral: go with Workstation 6.x. (Thanks to mrz for making this crucial suggestion. Its value is even more apparent later in our story.)
• Create a new VMWare Windows XP image. I chose an 8-gig image, for no particular reason. (And in fact, now that I have everything running properly, I’ll see if I can knock that down. I have about 3.7 gigs left, and can’t imagine using any more than a gig of that.)
• Install Windows XP. I paid something like $50 for a copy direct from the Microsoft store, courtesy of a close friend who will remain nameless.
• Install all your various Windows service packs by going to the Start menu, then Run, then typing iexplore http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/. There may be other ways to do this, but that one has always been surefire for me. Keep doing this, along with the necessary restarts, until you have no more updates left to install.
• Install VMWare Tools into the image. This is under the “VM” menu.
• Install iTunes into the image.
• Within VMWare Tools, turn on Shared Folders. This allows you to share a chunk of the filesystem from the host OS (in this case Ubuntu) with the guest OS (Windows). I used this so that I wouldn’t have to copy MP3s that are already available in Linux into Windows. The shared-folders feature is only available under Workstation, so far as I know.

• Here’s the cool part: even though Linux doesn’t really know what to do with the iPhone, VMWare can dig it. This seriously impressed me. Normally when I plug in the iPhone, Ubuntu recognizes the phone’s camera and asks me if I want to open it in F-Spot, but doesn’t do anything with the iPod component or the various installed apps. But lsusb tells me that I have an iPhone: it says Bus 005 Device 002: ID 05ac:1292 Apple Computer, Inc., and lsusb -v dumps out 303 lines of information; clearly it knows that something’s up. It’s just that Ubuntu doesn’t know how to make use of that information.

  Fortunately VMWare does. Under the “VM” menu, then “Removable Devices”, then “USB Devices”, we have “Apple iPhone (EHCI Port 1)”. Select that item. Voilà: the iPhone has now been passed through to Windows. Windows recognizes the device, the same way it would recognize any USB device that you plug into a USB port. Give Windows some time to load the appropriate drivers. Then launch iTunes. After a few moments, you should see an iPhone in your leftmost pane.

• Now you want iTunes to see the files from your shared folders. Go to the VM menu, then Settings, then Options, then Shared Folders. Select “Always Enabled”, because why not. Add a folder with some descriptive name (like “MP3s”) pointing to a path on the host OS (here Linux). I would select “Read-only”, but I don’t know whether iTunes needs to write into my MP3 directory.

  Here I ran into some problems, which may or may not have had to do with various quirks of my particular install. I had to use a little hack to make Windows see a host called \.host. (You put an entry in the lmhosts file which manually specifies that .host == localhost.) I also had to reinstall the VMWare Tools, per a somewhat unrelated knowledge base entry. Without these two steps, there was no .host machine, hence no shared folders available within VMWare. With those steps taken care of, I mapped a drive letter to my MP3 collection. You can do this any number of ways: net use f: \.hostShared Folders at the command line (Start → Run → cmd) will work, as will My Network Places → Tools → Map Network Drive.

And there we go: you now have a VMWare instance from which you can run iTunes under Linux — and possibly from any other VMWare host OS.

…Huh. Looking at it just now, it appears that my Workstation install never expires. How does that work? I was actually more than willing to pay $50 just now to register this thing. Man. Thanks, VMWare!