At any rate, as the owner of an iPod classic, I am hoping that this fix, when/if it is realized, will include my device as well. I couldn't get my 6G classic or 5.5G to work with iTunes in a Windows guest for love or money.

Seems odd, but I wonder if it has anything to do with USB devices that support LUNs, which I suspect the iPhone does. How else could you produce a USB device that appears to the computer as a digital camera, but then also have an IFS that's mountable? Multiple channels, duh... a USB feature that is rarely used and probaby rather untried on Linux.

I haven't heard anybody using FreeBSD (win4bsd) to try to sync to the iPhone with that to see if it works, although I'm scared of what I would lose in order to move off Linux and on to FreeBSD, and I'm not even certain how reliable win4bsd actually is... whether it can run some of my strange Windows apps. Most of the popular open source Linux apps are on BSD, especially compiz and evolution, but I'm a heavy Linux user with lots of apps... I'm sure I'll lose something just to try. I'm not 100% positive that all my Linux binaries will execute on FreeBSD either... like all the hundreds of .so that I got.

If the Linux kernel is the reason why iPhone support is non-existent, then maybe the issue isn't there when running FreeBSD which has a different USB subsystem than Linux? Wish I had the time to try.

No matter what system I have, I would have to keep Windows around. I do some development with SAP NetWeaver, which is basically Eclipse plus a TON (and I mean a TON) of custom plugins which SAP hooks on to Eclipse. I could move all that to a server at work and rdesktop into work and use it from there, perhaps. I also use stamps.com (Windows only) and the occasional need to use IE to check website compatibility--I have no need for Windows. IES4Linux does get IE to come up under WINE for me, but (surprise) the fonts are all askew so rendering is not realistic to what IE actually looks like on a normal Windows box. DHTML+Javascript is also painfully slow under WINE (try Googlemaps with it). Gotta keep a virtual environment around in any case.

My native Windows environment is gone. I deleted it to get some hard drive space. I last booted natively sometime back in October. So now I can't even sync my iPhone at all anymore. I buy music on the iPhone itself, so I have no iTunes installed anywhere. I can borrow a laptop in case I get a critical iPhone update I need to apply.

In the Mac world, Parallels and VMware Fusion both support iPhone. Sad, huh?

Maybe if George Bush would give me a huge rebate check I would actually buy a high-end Mac system, but I can't. I'll have to settle with my high end PC.

VMware... you use to update the host on almost a bi-weekly basis. Now it's been months since a patch. Are we gonna see a patch come down for the iPhone anytime soon???

Come on VMWare.. get the finger out !