So I was helping a friend with a Windows computer whose disk was so full that it couldn’t do anything. I mean, it only had 2GB free! The horrors!

I couldn’t run the Control Panel thingy so I could look up the serial number to make a restore CD from Lenovo. Why Windows makes this so hard is another rant. I understand why they do it, but I question how big a deal it is.

I cleaned up Windows, which I thought removed a 4GB Windows Update file, but apparently not. No advice worked, so I punted to Linux. I flashed a drive (now it has to be larger than 2GB, so I had to hunt for one of those) on my Mac using the .iso I downloaded from Ubuntu and balenaEtcher. No big whoop, although it took about four hours.

Booting to the flash drive was no big deal, although I needed Fn-10 on this laptop apparently. Ubuntu installed just fine.

Now the fun begins. My friend wants iTunes. Fair enough. Install WINE to run Windows programs. I get the latest Windows iTunes, run the installer, and launch iTunes. I get a black screen. The advice is to get an older iTunes (or, alternate advice is to be Windows XP instead). I get 12.1.3. That works.

But, that doesn’t recognize that there’s an iPhone plugged in. That’s not a big deal. We only need to get photos off this thing anyway.

We need something to pair with the iPhone and to mount it as a filesystem. The first part can use libimobiledevice and the second part can use ifuse

$ sudo apt install libimobiledevice6 libimobiledevice-utils ifuse

There’s also a very complicated set of steps in How can I mount my iPhone 6s on Ubuntu 16.04?. Some of my problems might be that I installed packages instead of compiling the source myself.

We can connect the iPhone and pair easily enough with a couple of steps to get the passcode and have the iPhone trust the computer (iOS 7 Locked Bug via Ubuntu 13.10 and iOS 7 Compatibility / Trust Dialog handling for weird historical details. And, How to access and mount iPhone 6 in Linux - Tutorial).

$ idevicepair pair
ERROR: Could not validate with device ... because a passcode is set. Please enter the passcode on the device and retry.$ idevicepair pair
$ idevicepair pair
ERROR: Please accept the trust dialog on the screen of device ..., then attempt to pair again.
$ idevicepair pair
SUCCESS: Paired with device ...

But, the iPhone doesn’t remember this trust. Every time we connect the phone we have the two step process of unlocking it and responding to the prompt. Blech.

Once connected, we can use ifuse to mount the thing.

The iPhone does eventually mount, but it’s a pain. I try to write a quick shell script to run this, but my friend was a bit impatient and doesn’t want to stick around to figure out why mkdir -p returns 1 when the directory exists (seriously, wtf?). They also want to be a programmer, so I say “This is programming. Welcome to hell.”.