iphone and ubuntu 8.04

[angelsniper45]

Is there any way to sync iphones to ubuntu machines? ive seen some but their only for jailbroken 1.x.x phones and i would love to have my contacts, music, and movies and whatnot. Any advice gets +rep.

[micah]

There's linux programs out there to copy data onto and off of your iPhone (rhythmbox, the built-in music player can already do music), but there isn't a way to "sync" it. You pretty much have to use iTunes to do that. And as much as Apple profits off of Free Software (they use a lot of GNU software, bash, gcc, gdb, and kind of dependent on it all for Mac OS X to run), they do a real crap job of contributing to the open source community, or making any of their products run on linux.

You can run a Windows XP virtual machine inside of VirtualBox and install iTunes in that. You can sync with that, but it's kind of a pain.