Sync iPad with Fedora

I don't have a Mac anymore, and we don't have any Windows desktop at home (yes, we're a Linux-desktop household, yay!), so one itty bitty issue is syncing the iPad, which has become the mobile entertainment device du jour.

Good thing there's libimobiledevice, a worthy project that "talks the protocols to support [Apple] devices." The software library doesn't depend on any proprietary library, and doesn't require jailbreaking -- it Just Works (TM). Hooray for open source!

Unfortunately, we're still on Fedora 15 (Lovelock) -- yeah, I know, it's end-of-support already, but I'm a bit queasy about upgrading to "Beefy Miracle" -- and its libimobiledevice version doesn't support iOS 5 out-of-the-box.

So I did what any self-respecting Linux user would do: build my own package from upstream. (Well, maybe not all Linux users would do that...) It was the usual download-configure-make-make install combo.

Then I found out that there's an existing build for F16 that works just as nicely. D'oh!

I'm a bit O.C. so I opted for that (much cleaner) build instead:

I plugged in the iPad, fired up Banshee, and I haz iPad syncing:

One downside, though, is that video syncing is not yet available in this version of Banshee. Perhaps 2.2 or 2.4 has that functionality, but I don't want to go through dependency hell. I'll just upgrade to F16 (or F17 -- it's inevitable, I guess...) instead.