Saturday 26 January 2008

One Step Beyond!

OK, the only reason I still have Vista on my hard drive is because I own an iPod and because Apple in its infinite wisdom decided to make the entire device proprietary. As a result I have to run iTunes in order to get music onto my iPod.

Now there are a few possibilities when it come to running iTunes on Linux. The first would be for apple to make a version of iTunes for Linux, an idea that went up in flames when Apple went with DRM (Linux is far too open source). The second possibility is WINE (standing for Wine Is Not an Emulator) this program creates a windows compatibility layer between Linux and the program you are trying to run.

The program works a treat on most old programs, yeh OLD programs, this is fine if, like me, you learned web design, animation and image manipulation on Studio MX but if you need some of the newer iterations your stuffed! At one point the WINE team got iTunes working, but Apple are bringing out updates for the software so often that it wouldn't be viable for the team to try and keep up. If you have an old iPod (pre this generation, I think) then this option might be good for you.

I, however, went out and bought an iPod Touch the newest of the new. An iPod which wont run on any previous incarnations of iTunes. So whats my solution? VirtualBox.

VirtualBox is free Virtualization software which allows you to run an OS from inside an OS. This means I can run a full blown copy of XP inside Linux! At the moment of writing this I've still got some tweaking to do (such as install iTunes and figure why everything is running so slow!) but I'll get some screenshots up in a few hours.

UPDATE: I spent hours trying to get it working but only ended up in a frustrated mess of linux and windows command lines! So I've given up! I'll wait for WINE to support iTunes 7.whatever! In the mean time iTunes is still a reason to keep a windows partition :-(

Compiz Fusion + Windows!

Boring... I hate waiting!

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