For those who own an iPhone/iPod Touch and at the same time is an Ubuntu (or Linux) users, here’s is a good news. You can now easily mount your iPhone in your Ubuntu without having to jailbreak your phone.

In the past, the dirty but effective way to access the iPhone from your Linux system is via SSH. This requires you to jailbreak your phone and it voids the warranty. With iFuse, you can now mount your iPhone/iPod Touch under Linux with just a USB cable. You can also view/edit/cut/copy/paste the file just like any USB disk drive.

Installation

Open up your terminal, type the following to open up your APT sources file

gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Insert the following lines to the end of the file

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonabeck/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonabeck/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

The above is assuming that you are using Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty). For any other version, simply replace the jaunty by the respective version name (hardy, intrepid, karmic etc)

Save and close the file.

Back in the terminal:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com F0876AC9
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ifuse

Once the installation is done, connect your iPhone to your computer via the USB cable.

Open up your Nautilus. You should see the iPhone/iPod entry at the side pane. This show that it is already mounted in your system.

Click on the entry to view the filesystem.

Things that you can do

1. View/copy/download photos.

You can now manage the photos that you have taken with your iPhone without iTunes.

2. Create folders, upload/download files

You can now use your iPhone as a USB drive and use it for file storage. To allow confusion/conflict with the other system files, it is best to create a custom folder (and name it My Folder) and store all your files there.

3. Managing address book/calendar (upcoming)

Work is underway to sync the contact data with Conduit.

What you cannot do now

Manage your music database

Apple uses a cryptographic signing algorithm to encrypt all the music files. While you can access the music folder, there is no way that you can transfer your music over and get it to work in your iPhone.

Note:
1. iFuse is not Ubuntu-specific app. It works for most Linux distro as well.

2. Mac users can also use iPhoneDisk to achieve similar functionality.