iPhone 3.x Sync’ed in Linux (Full Gentoo Guide)

Okay, so This is the third (and hopefully final) walkthrough for getting your iPhone to sync with Gentoo and now I am incorporating file transfer and music management. The process is actually very simple, but you should make sure to follow all of the steps. I encountered some problems along the way as well; I received an error from one of the commands that used in other walkthroughs “Couldn’t read xml sysinfo from uuid.” I simply fixed it by “READING” all of the steps properly and everything worked, so if you don’t read, you won’t get it!

Even though I have thanked him once before, thanks again to Marcan and his blog. His hard work has made this possible. I recommend reading his walkthrough to get a better understanding of everything. This walkthrough is a similar walkthrough to his, but targets Gentoo. As stated in all other walkthroughs, you do not need to jailbreak your phone, but I recommend it, makes everything easier. I nor any developer or provider is responsible for any damages that you cause by following our walkthroughs, so, if you brick, it is on you. Lastly, your iPhone should have already been plugged into iTunes and received a song at least once.

The way I did it might not be the way it SHOULD be done, but it did work. If you know of a better way, please bring it to light.

First, you will need the Rion overlay like I wrote in earlier posts.

Next, you will need to emerge a few needed packages. I found that the libgpod package in portage isn’t going to work, so will have to manually install that one from the sourceforge project page. In the mean time, I will try writing an ebuild for it so that it can be emerged. (I emerged it, an then built new one over it) Additionally, the versions that you have will also matter, but the 9999 versions mostly don’t work yet, so a couple of entries into your package.keywords and package.use will be necessary. Also, before emerging any of this, I would recommend adding “ipod” you your USE flags in your /etc/make.conf file.

Next, you will need to build the custom version of libgpod. If everything is built right on your system, then you should be fine, but if you get any errors, of course you will need to fix them before you continue. You will need git in order to obtain this build from the sourceforge repository. Find a nice location on your drive, and as root, execute the following.

Now, we have start testing everything out. We need to make sure that your phone is fully connected once you plug it in, and we need to make sure that usbmuxd is detecting your phone. We have to create the usbmux user so that usbmuxd will work properly. You will have to make sure that this user has access to usb and plugdev. I added wheel too, but it isn’t necessary.

Once everything is emerged successfully, you need to test out and make sure that your iphone is being registered when it connects. First you will have to modify the udev rules so that you can see the output. Increase the syslog debug level by editing “/lib/udev/rules.d/85-usbmuxd.rules” and adding “-v -v” flags to the end of both RUN statements. Now you can run the following and see if usbmuxd is seeing your iphone.

Now it is time to mount the device, create some required folders, and get your UUID. Since you now have ifuse, you can easily mount your device, but in order to do this, it is required to be in a specific location. Additionally, if you want your users (not root) to also have ifuse privileges, you will need to edit the config files to do that.

Now obtain your UUID either from the logs, or by running…

Your UUID is a long hexadecimal string that is roughly 40 characters long. In the longs above, mine is 69a4294a91a56958927f3fafe0086bf90ccd2d2b. Now, lets generate the XML file for your phone, simply run…

This will create the file iTunes_Control/Device/SysInfoExtended file. Make sure there is stuff in it, and it is not empty. It should be a large XML file with a bunch of info.

If there were no errors, then you are good to go. You can now sync up with linux and transfer music. In the future, when you plug your device in, you simply need to run…

I have been using GTKPod to transfer my music over to the device, however, it should work with other applications like RhythmBox or Amarok. I haven’t tried them out yet, but I would be interested to see if anyone gets that working.