Iphone In Linux?

I recently bought an iPhone after washing and destroying my previous phone. I have found that it works pretty well for what it is. I only would like to use it somehow in with SuSE. I'm fairly certain there is no way to get native support in SuSE, so I was wondering what other options there are. I though of several and was just wondering if anyone had any experience with any of them:

1. Install XP and iTunes in a Virtual Machine (last time I made a virtual machine I used VMWare - I'm not sure if that still the best way to go)

2. Play around with WINE and maybe get lucky after a lot of hacking

3. Continue dual booting to Windows every few days to update podcasts and contacts.

I don't want to hack my iPhone as Apple seems determined to add features only legal users can access. It would also be nice to be able to use the same library of music as my dual boot windows iTunes, but that is not entirely necessary. I really just need to make sure that I can use my music in Amarok and the iTunes library at the same time. When I ran my VMWare virtual machine last time, I had to share directories as if they were over a network. It worked, but was a bit awkward.

Thanks for any input, advice or suggestions. Whatever I try, I post my results. I would just like to end this constant switching between operating systems. I've used SuSE since 9.1, and while I keep windows around for the occasional game or required windows programming, I prefer to stay in Linux.

I recently bought an iPhone after washing and destroying my previous phone. I have found that it works pretty well for what it is. I only would like to use it somehow in with SuSE. I'm fairly certain there is no way to get native support in SuSE, so I was wondering what other options there are. I though of several and was just wondering if anyone had any experience with any of them:

1. Install XP and iTunes in a Virtual Machine (last time I made a virtual machine I used VMWare - I'm not sure if that still the best way to go)

2. Play around with WINE and maybe get lucky after a lot of hacking

3. Continue dual booting to Windows every few days to update podcasts and contacts.

I don't want to hack my iPhone as Apple seems determined to add features only legal users can access. It would also be nice to be able to use the same library of music as my dual boot windows iTunes, but that is not entirely necessary. I really just need to make sure that I can use my music in Amarok and the iTunes library at the same time. When I ran my VMWare virtual machine last time, I had to share directories as if they were over a network. It worked, but was a bit awkward.

Thanks for any input, advice or suggestions. Whatever I try, I post my results. I would just like to end this constant switching between operating systems. I've used SuSE since 9.1, and while I keep windows around for the occasional game or required windows programming, I prefer to stay in Linux.
[/b]

as far as i'm aware with linux you can only use the iphone as a drag and drop device, so for example adding songs you would find the music directory, and paste songs in there or whatever. ragarding updates i have no idea, wine would seem the best option if you can get it to work. i may be wrong though.

Just thought I would post an update.

Syncing an unhacked iPhone appears impossible in Linux. I installed Virtualbox with winXP. I then added iTunes. iTunes works, only it can't recognize the iPhone. The virtual machine passes the usb connection to winXP, but something goes wrong. WinXP only sees the phone as a digital camera and not a phone as it does in a native install. Searching through Virtualbox and VMWare forums, this seems to be a problem across all virtualization software programs. Posts on the VMWare site indicate that it can pass the usb port correctly from a windows host to a windows virtual machine, but not from Linux to windows. Of course there is all kind of blaming of programmers from Apple to Microsoft to Linux to VMware. I have no idea what the real problem is, I just know the iPhone won't appear in the iTunes program window for updates.

I also checked Wine. Apparently, they are talking about adding certain support for USB devices. It seems certain very simple USB devices can be handled with special drivers. General USB support or support for complex is indicated as not supported currently. I could be wrong here. I tried really quickly to install iTunes on my system, but that failed. Others have had success with installing iTunes, and I even saw a blog where someone claimed to have written modifications to Wine that allowed it to see an iPod. It didn't provide details and seemed more of a proof of concept than an actual method to update an iPod. The old iPods use a different interface than the new iPhone or iTouch so they could very well work and it not help me at all.

If anyone knows anything more about Wine let me know. I just don't want to spend days working on getting iTunes to run perfectly in Wine only to find out I can't interface with USB without writing kernel drivers.

So this isn't a happy success-filled post, but hopefully it will help someone save some time in the future. Sometimes knowing what won't work is as helpful as what will.

Take a look here http://www.gtkpod.org/about.html

Unfortunately that requires "hacking" the iPhone to work. I want to stay away from that as apple plans to release new features and programs that won't run on a hacked iPhone. The library does work on iPods older than the current generation without a problem though.

I guess I could have just waited for the open source google Android phones, but that might have been a while and I needed a phone this year.