one, it basically (as in fully) runs a small linux OS
two, it streams uPnP by default
three, it can be modified (hacked) to allow more options (ssh, web server, MediaTomb, package manager for more goodies, etc)
finally, which is obvious from the first reason, it doesn’t use NTFS or FAT for it’s partition, it uses EXT2 or EXT3.

Out of the box, I loaded it with all of my music and movies, and boom, it was sharing. I later found that it supported NFS so that I could mount it locally, and transfer even faster than ftp. All around, this was a GREAT purchase.

Not being satisfied, I ventured out a little, and started looking for modifications, after all, it isn’t perfect. I stumbled across fun_plug. This allows some great new features to be activated, and unlocks a lot of features that are locked otherwise. To sum it up, you interrupt the boot process, and obtain access to the core. This allows you to start ssh and unlock other features on the drive. This can be down with a few steps, download and copy the files over, reboot, and punch in a couple of commands.

A walkthrough will be under-way soon!

First you need the DVD or the ISO of the DVD. From an older article, I talked about using vlc to do this, but updates have seemed to make this process useless, so now we just use the command line.

Simply:

or

After this, you have a “stream.dump” file. All you have to do is…

(I do this is two steps to demonstrate that if you had a bunch of stream.dump files, you can easily convert them)

The size of this file is going to be big, but you have a DVD quality file with no extra encryption b.s. to mess with.

FYI, I tested this file out on my NAS and it streams perfect.

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.

[singlepic id=20 w=320 h=240 float=left] [singlepic id=21 w=320 h=240 float=center]

Step 1: First, you need add the Rion overlay from layman.

(if you have a PORTDIR_OVERLAY line already, then just add it manually with your favorite editor)

Step 2: You will need to emerge a couple of packages, if you have them installed, it is best to remove them first, then emerge the new ones.

You will need the following packages in order for this to work right. Note that the version DOES matter. If you have older versions, they need to go, but same or later versions are good.

• 1. dev-libs/libusb-1.0.5
• virtual/libusb-1
• 2. app-pda/ifuse-0.9.4
• 3. app-pda/libplist-0.16
• 4. app-pda/libiphone-0.9.4
• 5. app-pda/usbmuxd-1.0.0_rc2

The 9999 packages of any of these really didn’t work for me, so I suggest masking them out.

Additionally, I would make sure that amarok and/or rhythmbox are built with ipod support (USE=”ipod”). Just add the ‘ipod’ use flag to your USE line in /etc/make.conf.

Now, 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.

If you are seeing your phone come up, then everything was done right. The last thing to do is mount the phone. simply use ifuse, and mount it to a specified mount point.

Again, you can now browse the entire filing system, and when you import the music, it should convert so that it isn’t in the hashed/encrypted form. Rhythmbox even got the album art.

I am working on how to copy music to the iphone now, so if anyone got that down, please let me know.

http://marcansoft.com/blog/2009/10/iphone-syncing-on-linux/

It seems as if there is a project underway to help us linux users get the best out of our iPhones!

Overlay: http://bugs.gentoo.org/192561

Next, the config files; if you had an old version of uShare, ditch it, and all of it’s config files(/etc/ushare.conf).  I used the following config for /etc/conf.d/ushare … and make sure that you add ‘-c’ in front of the directories you plan on sharing, or uShare wont start up, and wont give you any proper error readout.

After this, you should be good. Start uShare with ‘/etc/init.d/ushare start’, point your browser to YOUR.IP:49152/web/ushare.html , and you can add more directories to share there.

Overall, the web interface is really bare and has no automatic refresh option, so every time you add files to the share directories, you have to restart the service, or click the refresh button on the web interface, however, it works. The only downfall is that it doesn’t perform transcoding, so you have to make sure you encode your videos in the right format. (I am working on that now, because I can see all of the directories, but the files are the “wrong format”)

Another tip, when trying to connect from the Xbox, make sure that you are in the “Video Library”, “Music Library”, or “Picture Library” and not in the Windows Media Center section. UPnP does not substitute WMC.

Now, you will need to obtain a version of the 2.x firmware, and your device will need to be jailbroken. After you have jailbroken the device, you need to install ‘OpenSSH’ and ‘Mobile Terminal’ from Cydia or Installer. These allow the obvious, ssh access and a terminal on the device.

On your linux box, you will need Amarok 1.4.10 or before, sadly, Amarok 2.0 will not work yet. You will also need sshfs and fuse.

# echo "media-sound/amarok ipod" /etc/portage/package.use
# emerge sys-fs/fuse sshfs-fuse =media-sound/amarok-1.4.10-r2

Set a static ip address on the device to match your the network your linux box is on.

Now, ssh into the device, the root password is defaulted to alpine.

$ ssh root@192.168.1.110

Edit the /etc/ssh/ssh_config on the device, and add the following lines:

iTouch# nano /etc/ssh/ssh_config

RSAAuthentication yes
PubkeyAuthentication yes
AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys

Next, you need to generate a ssh key for passwordless login into the device, and copy it to the device.

$ ssh-keygen
$ ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@192.168.1.110

Now to make sure that your permissions are set right for passwordless login:

iTouch # cd ~
iTouch # cp .ssh/authorized_keys .ssh/authorized_keys2
iTouch # chmod 755 /var/root
iTouch # chmod 700 /var/root/.ssh
iTouch # chmod 644 /var/root/.ssh/authorized_keys
iTouch # reboot

After your device has rebooted, test your connection to make sure that you can log into your device without a password.

$ ssh root@192.168.1.110

If all is well, mount the device to your desired directory, or you can use ipod-touch-mount or iphone-mount in Ubuntu.

$ mkdir ~/itouch
$ sshfs root@192.168.1.110:/var/mobile/Media ~/itouch

Next, we have to get and set the Firewire GUID:

$ cd ~/itouch/iPod_Control/Device
$ su
# lsusb -v -d 05ac: | grep iSerial | awk '{print $3}' | cut -b1-16 | xargs printf "FirewireGuid: 0x%s\n" > SysInfo

Reboot the device. Now, before we can continue with syncing and adding music to the device, we have to modify the database version. This will allow libgpod to recognize and sync your device to Amarok. Sadly, I haven’t gotten this to work with RhythmBox or Exile.

We are going to log into the device, and edit the checkpoint.xml file…

$ ssh root@192.168.1.110
iTouch # nano /System/Library/Lockdown/Checkpoint.xml

Search for the DBVersion Key, and change the value from 4 to 2.

iTouch # reboot

The last thing we have to do is add your device to Amarok so that it will populate your music and you can sync your device.

• Launch Amarok, and go to Settings => Configure Amarok…
• Click the ‘Media Devices’ botton at the bottom
• Click ‘Add Device…’
• Select ‘Apple iPod Media Device’
• Name your Device
• The mount point should be ‘/home/$USER/itouch’ (unless you are using ipod-touch-mount, then it is /media/ipod)
• Click Ok, and your are all set. Once you are in Amarok, just go to the devices tab on the bottom left (printed sideways) and click the ‘Connect’ button on your device and your music will populate in that device window. You can drag and drop your music into that device from your Amarok music collection as well.