I have a few MP3 files I want to put onto my iPhone. I have them on my dropbox account so I can access them but each time I do, I need to download them which take up bandwidth. Any ideas how I can put them on my iPhone from Mint?

Mike

Ooo...you've come upon the question which is the holy grail for us iPhone users. The short answer is to use ITunes, either under Wine, or natively in Windows or MacOS, or under a VM with Windows and ITunes installed. The long answer is you can install the libmobiledevice package, and it might work, and it might not, but it's worth a try, maybe, but it's probably not worth the effort.

See this for the status of what works and what doesn't under libmobiledevice (scroll down to the Status section):
http://www.libimobiledevice.org

A few other links, just for fun:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=138131
http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/89
http://www.simplehelp.net/2007/07/08...ing-your-ipod/

In short, the only guaranteed method is to use ITunes. Everything else is may or may not work.

Good luck!

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for the reply! I am sure it easier asked then to do, but why hasn't anyone put something together for the iPhone? I have never been able to get anything to work with using Wine. Can you recommend an information source for a newbie? In addition to iTunes, I would like to get a few old school DOS games to work and QuickBooks as well.

asking apple to make a gnu/linux version of itunes is like asking ford to make parts for chevy.

this article indicates that before palm went out of business, their palm pre used to sync with itunes but apple kept breaking (ehrm, updating) that functionality and the palm developers got tired of constantly trying to re-implement it:
http://www.wired.com/2009/10/palm-pre-itunes/

They have.
The libmobiledevice link above is the current state of what has been achieved by some very smart people working very hard for a long time to attempt to overcome artificial obstacles to what should be a simple process.

Vote with your wallet...

2 members found this post helpful.

Haha I forgot about the Palm/iTunes fiasco. It was pretty intense for a while. I think every other day Slashdot had a post about it.

Libmobiledevice is about as advanced as it gets. They've put a LOT of work into it. Apple puts a lot of artificial roadblocks in the way, making it inordinately difficult to access the filesystems on their devices.

Not to take the thread off-topic, but...
As for using Windows programs on Linux, getting started with Wine is pretty easy. Getting programs to run perfectly is not so easy. In any case it's way beyond my ability to describe. A good place to start is here:

http://www.winehq.org

This link kind of shows what works well, or what doesn't, under Wine:

http://appdb.winehq.org

Wine is not the best place to start for DOS programs though. I would use DOSBox for that. Information can be found here:

http://www.dosbox.com

Both Wine and DOSBox should be in the repositories. Just install them and start going! In my opinion, DOSBox is easier to use and run than Wine, but they are both pretty user friendly.

As much as I like some of my old Windows and DOS programs, I try to use open source alternatives, keeping in mind I am fairly pragmatic in that regard. I use what works for me.

Good luck!

There is an iphone app that is free called Filexchange. It allows you to transfer files from windows,Mac and linux to the iphone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWS7w_p0vxs

I don't own an iphone so I don''t know how well it works.

Anyway, iphone users and android users have something in common. It's not intuitive to transferring files from linux to these devices. In the past, android was a snap to transfer files to it because it used the USB mass storage protocal. Today, they use the MTP protocal and it doesn't work as good as USB mass storage.

I have to use third party apps like Airdroid, File Expert HD or android SDK to transfer the files.

Bumper

1 members found this post helpful.