A developer has fixed a problem with an old library

Mar 14, 2014 10:38 GMT  ·  By

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is still in the development stages, but it has some problems connecting with iOS7 devices because it uses an outdated library. This problem has been fixed with a patch by a developer.

We can't really blame the Ubuntu developers for problems with the libimobiledevice library, which is very old and hasn't been updated in a while. When connecting an iOS7 device to a PC, a so-called trust dialogue is presented to the user on the phone, asking if that particular source of power can be trusted. Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't report back correctly and the iOS devices message goes into a loop, even if the user has pressed the “trusted” button.

“The latest libimobiledevice release 1.1.5 is a year old and does not support iOS7 devices. Most iOS devices have been updated to iOS7 by now, so currently the library is broken in functionality for most users. The git snapshot has been tested to work, but there seems to be no new upstream release being prepared for the time being,” said the developer on Launchpad.

He fixed the problem with a new version of libimobiledevice, but the problem is that Ubuntu has passed the feature freeze point, which means that developers will need to make an exception, so this particular new library version will be included in the official repositories.

Until the feature freeze exception is solved, a PPA has been set up with the new version of the library so anyone can use it with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr). All you have to do is to open a terminal and enter the following commands (you will need to be root for this to work).

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:timo-jyrinki/libimobiledevice sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade

This is still work in progress and users might still encounter problems. For example, if you are prompted with the “lock down error,” you need to run these commands in a terminal: sudo mkdir /var/lib/lockdown sudo chmod 777 /va7Lib/lockdowno

If, for some reason, you want to revert to the previous version of the libimobiledevice librayr, that can be easily done by purging the PPA that you have just added. Open a terminal and enter the following commands:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge sudo ppa-purge ppa:timo-jyrinki/libimobiledevice This should be all. We tested the new version and it seemed to go without a hitch. If you encounter problems, you should consider restarting or loging out, and trying again.

Enjoy!