Thursday, January 8, 2009

How to setup virtualbox to sync itunes with your ipod in Ubuntu

For anyone who has the latest and the gayest Apple iPood touch or iPhone that has some encryption shit on it you probably need iTunes. Well all my PC's are now running Linux and I doubt my parents PC would really like having 8 gigs of songs on it :P

Here's what your going to need to do:
-Install VirtualBox (not VirtualBox OSE)
-Fix the error regarding USB connectivity

1.Get the correct version of VirtualBox (not OSE) for your OS and processor from: http://www.virtualbox.org
2.Save it to your home folder and open up the terminal. You will then run this command:
"sudo dpkg -i packagename.deb" (Replace packagename.deb with the respective package name.)
3.Once it's done installing, either get the virtual machine profile for your copy of windows (XP for me) or Install a fresh copy from a CD or .iso file.
4.Once XP is installed, install iTunes. This is as far as you can go for now, so just shut off the virtual machine and exit VirtualBox.
5.Now we need to edit ubuntu to add USB support for Virtual Box. Run this in the Terminal once VirtualBox is closed:
echo "none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid="$(sed '/plugdev/!d;s/plugdev:x:\(.*\):.*/\1/' /etc/group)",devmode=664 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
6.Now we need to rebuild the virtualbox kernel modules, by running this command:
sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup
7.Once that is finished, restart and open up VirtualBox. Select your virtual machine and click settings. Go to USB and check both "Enable USB Controller" and "Enable USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller", if your machine is USB 2.0 capable.
8.Boot up the virtual OS, and Hook up the iPod to your PC
9.In the Virtual OS window menu go to Devices>Usb Devices, and click on "Apple inc iPod".

Now you can sync your iPod with iTunes. To transfer files to your windows virtual machine from Ubuntu I just made a FTP server. Here's a tutorial I did on how to make an FTP server:
How to setup FTP access quickly and lazily in ubuntu

2 comments:

  1. "sudo packagename.deb"

    wouldn't that be 'sudo dpkg -i packagename.deb'?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for pointing that out. Ubuntu automatically associates .deb files to run in dpkg. But it is always good to take the extra step, and adapt this to other distros that don't handle file type associations in the terminal on their own.

    ReplyDelete