Comments on: Windows is Dead (almost). Long Live Free & Open Source Software, i.e. Ubuntu

By: Alan Lord

Alan Lord — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:30:54 +0000

Many thanks for the compliments Steven, I’m glad you enjoy my ramblings.

My kids have been on Ubuntu for well over a year now – they switch between this and school’s Winblows with ease.

We have discovered a small problem with the VirtualBox solution that I will need to rectify: CD Ripping is not yet working and looks like a known problem. So I think I’ll use a shared directory between VBox and Ubuntu and Helen can rip using Ubuntu and then import into iTunes that way. Songbird is shaping up nicely but there are a couple of missing features that she would miss so I will hang on a while.

Thanks again.

By: Steven

Steven — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:38:12 +0000

Nice article!
Having had a similar run-in with iTunes a few years ago, I feel your pain. We had quite a lot of music wrapped up in that nightmareish application and the only way to free it all – in every sense – was to burn the tracks to CD, then rip them back in in a DRM-free format. It took me days, but the songs are now sat on my main Linux machine alongside all the nicely DRM-free tracks I download from Amazon using their excellent, Linux-friendly download software.
We’ve now got just the one MS PC in our home – the one my wife and kids use – while I’ve got three desktops and a laptop all running Linux (3x CrunchBang, 1x whatever interests me at the time).
I really enjoy your blog – keep up the good work.
Kind regards.

By: Links 26/07/2009: GNU/Linux in French Schools, KDE 4.3 Excitement | Boycott Novell

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:06:46 +0000

[...] Windows is Dead (almost). Long Live Free & Open Source Software, i.e. Ubuntu VirtualBox 3.02 seems to be really good though. The USB pass through and auto-filtering is just brilliant (so Ubuntu doesn’t alert when you plug in the iPod when the VM is running; it goes straight through to the Windows VM). It does seem to take quite a long time for the whole Windows/iTunes thing to settle down after I’ve plugged the iPod in but it might be just because it’s a big 120G iPod anyway… But it isn’t a major issue. [...]

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 21:28:50 +0000

iTunes doesn’t run very well in Wine – though testers and bug reports are always welcome! Running it on a virtual XP will of course work.

By: Sense Hofstede

Sense Hofstede — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:26:44 +0000

I’ve been told that Banshee has really good iPod support. Or at least used to have, since it’s said that Apple killed support for everything else than iTunes:

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:12:52 +0000

My wife went the other way. She was running Ubuntu, but couldn’t easily do video-messaging with her family in Turkey, nor access her online training or run her practice driving-licence tests. So she pleaded for Windows and hasn’t looked back. Ubuntu is good, no doubt, but it had some serious limitations. Even Ubuntu on a laptop had to go in the end to be replaced with PuppyLinux due to sluggish performance. Still, all that said, good luck to you.

By: Sai

Sai — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 04:57:09 +0000

Hey,
The other way to work with itunes on Linux is to run itunes on Wine. They have some really good reviews.