Linux Quick tip for seamless virtualization

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viridian

Disciple
I recently picked up an iPod from the TE member's market (iPod Nano Black 4G :eek:hyeah: ). As I only have linux at home, I started running into issues while attempting to sync it with any of the available AV applications. Tried Amarok, banshee, rhythmbox. While some of them do allow you to put songs on the iPod, none of them allowed me to automatically synchronize podcasts and stuff (banshee does allow this feature but owing to the migration from HAL to DeviceKit it is currently hosed/partially working in the latest release of Ubuntu).

So with much sadness I decided to use iTunes for managing the iPod as God and Steve Jobs intended. I had a WinXP license lying around so I created the leanest possible Windows XP installation on VirtualBox (with nLite and other tricks picked up from lifehacker).

The issue was that I didn't really need all of Windows, just iTunes which should work with my iPod. To accomplish this I set a device filter on virtualbox to "trap" my iPod in the virtual machine whenever it was plugged in. The link below provides instructions for an older release of Virtualbox, but is should work even now.

Using USB device filters with Sun xVM VirtualBox - SearchServerVirtualization Blog

Now the best part is that Virtualbox supports something called seamless virtualization. Typically this allows you to blend desktop elements from the virtualmachine with your host. It can also be used to display only a specific Window if required. Once you've booted your VirtualMachine, you can select the window that needs to appear on your host OS (in my case iTunes) and press the host key + L (the host key is usually the right control key, but it can change. The lower right corner of the VM should tell you what the host key is).

Now you have iTunes pretending to look like a native linux application. If your virtual windows xp machine is running and you plug in your iPod, it should now show up in Windows and you can use iTunes to sync your tunes, podcasts etc.

I suppose other TE members use iPods with Linux too, what is your solution to obtaining an iTunes like experience? (Automatic synchronization, last.fm integration, podcasts).
 
I have tried all kinds of apps for perfect syncing of my music with my iPod, but to no avail. There is no apps that does what I want. Most of the times, Rhytmbox, Amarok and others reset my tags and cause a lot of confusion. They do not sync the music into iPod, and most of the times they move the songs into my iPod thereby removing them from my library.

I had to resort back to windows just for using iTunes, although my main OS is still Ubuntu.

Edit: I missed talking about the vitualbox experience. :p I used that too to sync my iPod, but somehow thta too didn't work. I enabled all USB ports use, tried enabling iPod to be registered as external disk, tried what nots, but didn't work. Finally had to setup a Ubuntu and XP dual boot.
 
hmmm this is nice. i should try seamless mode with my winxp license. so i can simply avoid having to buy win7 or boot into winxp proper at all :)
 
Seemsless virtualization is inneed nice because there are few apps which are windows only and there are no alternatives for it. though, the list is decreasing day by day.

Thanks for the Tip!
 
phoenix844884 said:
I have tried all kinds of apps for perfect syncing of my music with my iPod, but to no avail. There is no apps that does what I want. Most of the times, Rhytmbox, Amarok and others reset my tags and cause a lot of confusion. They do not sync the music into iPod, and most of the times they move the songs into my iPod thereby removing them from my library.
Click to expand...
i noticed that you havent mentioned either Songbird or gtkpod . Try it . Enable the Medibuntu repositories and install gtkpod .
or just follow this eHow tut for Songbird
How to Use the Songbird iPod Manager | eHow.com
 
GrimReaper said:
i noticed that you havent mentioned either Songbird or gtkpod . Try it . Enable the Medibuntu repositories and install gtkpod .
or just follow this eHow tut for Songbird
How to Use the Songbird iPod Manager | eHow.com
Click to expand...

Well I have tried gtkpod and it works (as in it detects my iPod, can transfer music). But my main use case is that when the iPod is plugged in all my stuff should automatically synchronize without me having to so much as lift a finger (lazy person). I think gtkpod can pull that off to an extent (perhaps some bash kungfu), but I've to use another app for getting podcasts and managing album art etc.

Songbird is not working with Karmic for iPods as of now. It apparently works for some people with some hacks mentioned here : ipod not connecting on Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 . Tried the hacks there too, did not work. It might work with Jaunty (9.04), but owing to some strange bug in the Jaunty kernel with my esoteric hardware, I cannot downgrade.

phoenix844884 said:
Edit: I missed talking about the vitualbox experience. I used that too to sync my iPod, but somehow thta too didn't work. I enabled all USB ports use, tried enabling iPod to be registered as external disk, tried what nots, but didn't work. Finally had to setup a Ubuntu and XP dual boot.
Click to expand...

Have you tried the latest release of VirtualBox? I think they squished a number of bugs with the 3.x releases. It just might work, and it would save you the trouble of dual booting.

For some time I did consider using RockBox, but I've gotten used to the iTunes way of managing music, with purchased AudioBooks, podcasts and music arranged properly (I could never figure out how to accomplish that in RockBox).
 
Thats sad Songbird does have podcasts , album art and last.fm support ...pretty much all your requirements and its one of the few that synchronizes without screwing up your ID3 tags
 
^^

Songbird keeps freezing up on Ubuntu Karmic (All my songs are on an external Seagate Freeagent drive). I think we need to wait for a more stable release.

Resorted to xmms (the older version). No Album art etc support, but good for listening.
 
I have my ripped music collection in a NTFS partition which needs mounting before use yet i have not had any issues with my Songbird . it (freezes) might have something to do with the partition format of your external drive .
 
^^

Mine is on NTFS and Fat32 partitions on the same drive (brand new seagate 500GB Freeagent Go). It freezes during song change, ID3 info update, etc. Looks to be an app issue (or maybe waiting for drive access).
 
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