An IT nomad's diary

Patched

Article from ADMIN 07/2012

By Thorsten Scherf

The latest gadget lies temptingly on the table in front of you, but it doesn't work with the Linux distribution you are currently using. What now? This month's Admin Story is all about modifying standard Linux packages.

I finally gave way to marketing pressure and decided to invest in an iPad. Now, some of you will be shaking your heads and asking yourselves why it had to be an Apple product of all things; after all, there are some really neat tablets with Android. Well, to avoid endless debate – which I've already had – just accept this purchase as a fact of life. As a road warrior, I typically have the tablet along with me, and I really use it a lot to transfer photos directly onto the web or to a computer. This works perfectly with iOS devices, thanks to Libimobiledevice [1]. The library lets users synchronize all kinds of media files between the tablet and Linux devices, and you can even use it to activate an iPhone.

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A while ago, I needed to transfer a number of photos and podcasts that I'd collected on my iPad to my desktop system. I use Shotwell for the photos and Banshee for audio files. Both tools can use Libimobiledevice to synchronize and manage the files on my tablet. After connecting the tablet to my PC, I encountered some disappointment. Nautilus told me that there was a problem mounting the device. And, despite some manual attention, all of my attempts failed. What was going on? A quick visit to the Libimobiledevice forum confirmed my suspicions: An update to iOS 5 was to blame.

When I checked the IRC channel for the software, the developers confirmed that some patches for iOS 5 were in the Git repository, but they had not even been bundled into an archive, let alone a pre-built installation package. The question was, should I wait until the maintainers had integrated the patches into the RPM package or go ahead and build my own package?

The first approach offered the benefit of not having to mess around with my system's package management system and potentially provoking issues with the next package update. On the other

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