iPhone / iTunes / Windows XP / VirtualBox / Ubuntu 9.10

2012-02-20 apple / linux

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Finally got this to work properly. The biggest trap is that when it restores / upgrades / whatever, it changes its USB ID, so don’t filter just on what it is when its working, or it will get stuck in recovery mode. DAMHIK.:

1. Install VirtualBox from the deb package at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

2. Tell hal to keep away from monoliths: /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-noiphone.fdi:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <deviceinfo version="0.2">
   <device>
   <match key="info.vendor" string="Apple, Inc.">
   <merge key="info.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
   </match>
   </device>
   </deviceinfo>
   

3. Tell usbhid to keep away too: /etc/modprobe.d/usbhid.conf:

   # iPhone
   options usbhid quirks=0x05ac:0x1294:0x04
   options usbhid quirks=0x05ac:0x1281:0x04
   

   Then run module-assistant update and reboot or otherwise reload the usbhid module

4. Configure VirtualBox to allow a filter for all Apple products (0x05AC) and

   leave the other fields blank

5. Start the virtual machine, select the iPhone device, run iTunes, etc.
6. If restoring / updating / whatever, note that every time the iPhone disconnects and reconnects or changes its ID, you’ll need to reselect the device … so watch it while it is working and check the Devices >> USB Devices menu any time it seems to get stuck.

Refs / Thanks To

• http://teknofire.net/articles/2009/07/06/ubuntu-vmware-and-accessing-the-iphone/
• http://swiss.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1285097
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1318160
• http://blahonga.yanson.org/2009/07/pain-upgrading-iphone-to-30-under.html
• http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=18852

Update

Backing up the iPhone using iTunes on VirtualBox is godawful slow. CPU load is pegged at 80-90% of one CPU, and it takes hours. This page: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&p=107254 helpfully mentions that it works okay if run from a smaller window, and despite the ludicrousness of this idea I gave it a go … CPU load is much lower and … well, its still slow, but it is at least moving.

Yep, took about an hour to back up ~15GB of stuff on the iPhone, as opposed to the several hours it used to take to get nowhere. Weird.

Update 2

I think that slowness problem is fixed in more recent versions … I’m now using VirtualBox 4.

Update 3

I use iTunes on Snow Leopard these days, and yes, you can make Snow Leopard run under VirtualBox if you try hard enough :-). It doesn’t seem to have the same slowdown problems.