However, when not using one of the monitors, Gnome does not know what to do with the panel normally displayed on that monitor and places it on the default monitor, resulting in two gnome-panels on one monitor. This is not so useful!

To circumvent this default Gnome behavior use the following procedure:

• Download gnome-panel-switch.sh script and put it somewhere you like:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Auto adjust the number of pannels based on the number of
# connected monitors.
#
# Author : Amain 2010
# Website: blog.zoomeren.nl
 
# Monitor states:
#   - connected 1440x900+0+0  ( connected and used )
#   - connected               ( connected not used )
#   - disconnected            ( disconnected       )
#
NR_OF_MONITORS=$( /usr/bin/xrandr -q | /bin/grep " connected [0-9]\+x[0-9]\+" | /usr/bin/wc -l )
 
# Second panel name
#
# note: retrieve the panel name using gconf-editor
#
SECOND_PANEL_NAME="panel_0"     
 
case $NR_OF_MONITORS in
        1)
                # Disable external monitor ( setting screen to -1 )
                #
                gconftool-2 --type int --set  /apps/panel/toplevels/$SECOND_PANEL_NAME/screen -- -1
        ;;
 
        2)
                # Enable external monitor ( restart is needed after setting screen to -1 )
                #
                gconftool-2 --type int --set  /apps/panel/toplevels/$SECOND_PANEL_NAME/screen 0
                /usr/bin/killall gnome-panel
        ;;
 
        *)
                # no action
        ;;
esac

• sudo chmod +x gnome-panel-switch.sh
• sudo mv /usr/bin/gnome-display-properties /usr/bin/gnome-display-properties.bin
• sudo vi /usr/bin/gnome-display-properties and paste the following script ( don’t forget to adjust the path in line where gnome-panel-switch.sh is called! ):

#!/bin/bash
#
# Auto adjust the number of pannels based on the number of
# connected monitors.
#
# Author : Amain 2010
# Website: blog.zoomeren.nl
 
# Open gnome-display-properties dialog
#
/usr/bin/gnome-display-properties.bin
 
# Auto enable/disable gnome-panels
#
YOURPATH/gnome-panel-switch.sh

• sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/gnome-display-properties
• Start gnome-panel-switch.sh every time Gnome starts to auto disable/enable the correct number of gnome-panels per display. Use Gnome Startup in the System Settings menu and add the invocation for this script.
• Important note: when /usr/bin/gnome-display-properties is replaced during a Ubuntu upgrade one looses the changes!

$HOME.mozilla/firefox/<random>.vmware/extensions/VMwareVMRC@vmware.com/plugins/vmware-vmrc

But no way it would start from the VMWare server webinterface. The solution in my case was simple though: Don’t use a Firefox profile with a space in the name. My profile was called ‘Default User’ and that didn’t work. After creating a new profile ( called vmware ), without spaces, it worked!

I tested everything on an ASUS WL-500GD and a user has reported that it also works on an ASUS WL-500G Premium v.1. The project contains an customised OpenWRT kernel (2.4 or 2.6)  (which will boot from an USB-disk or USB-stick) and an Debian Etch GNU/Linux pre-installed base image, which includes a lot of customisation. The image contains pre-configured out-of-the-box enabled networking, firewall, webserver, Samba server, and more.

Unfortunately there are some issues(see the project pages) with the b43 wireless driver and the 2.6 kernel, so for that reason I created also a 2.4 kernel image with full wireless support.

See the project website http://www.debwrt.net/ for more information. Also if you are interested in how to compile a custom OpenWRT kernel, or how to create an Debian base root filesystem for an embedded device from scratch.

The project  you need to mount the iPhone in Linux is called iFuse. iFuse is a module for the FUSE(Filesystem in Userspace) system. The project contains libiphone, which is used to access USB and does the lower level translations. Unfortunately, I could not find howto’s on the projects main website. But with some googling, I found the answers.

edit: iFuse is now providing DEB and RPM packages on there website now: iFuse. See /usr/share/doc/ifuse/README of their ifuse package for usage instructions.

1. Install libiphone (as root)
   1. git clone git://github.com/MattColyer/libiphone.git
   2. ./autgen.sh
   3. ./configure
   4. make
   5. make install
2. Install iFuse (as user)
   1. git clone git://github.com/MattColyer/ifuse.gi
   2. ./autgen.sh
   3. ./configure –prefix=/
   4. make
   5. make install
3. Generate keys (as user)
   1. /usr/local/bin/libiphone-initconf
      (This will generate some keys required to connect with the iPhone over USB)
4. Mount the iPhone’s root filesystem including the Media partition (as user)
   1. mkdir /mnt/iPhone (make sure you have write access to the mount mount)
   2. mount.fuse.ifuse –afc2 none /mnt/iPhone/ -s
      (The -s options seem to be related to threading/locking issues and is a workaround)
5. Or mount the iPhone’s Media partition only (as user)
   1. mount.fuse.ifuse none /mnt/iPhone/ -s
6. Or mount as root
   1. mount  mount none -t fuse.ifuse /mnt/iPhone
7. Unmounting (as user)
   1. fusermount -u /mnt/iPhone
8. Umounting (as root)
   1. umount /mnt/iPhone

I have been testing this on Ubuntu Intrepid. It would be nice to see GNOME GVFS to automount the iPhone over USB.  After some investigation of this matter I must conclude that UDEV, HAL, DBUS, GVFSD, GVFSD-backends are used to do the automounting in GNOME – which is quite complicated – I could not find any scripting-hooks (or configuration options) in GVFSD to do some BASH magic and auto mount the iPhone in GNOME.

The performance, using Nautilus to copy data from/to the iPhone is:

• Write (computer-to-iPhone): ~750 KB/s
• Read (iPhone-to-computer): ~2.9 MB/s

Not bad – although writing is a bit slow compared to the avg-read time. The iPhone 2.0 seems to be connected over USB 2.0 (480 mbit/s):

T:  Bus=03 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=00 Cnt=01 Dev#= 27 Spd=480 MxCh= 0
D:  Ver= 2.00 Cls=00(>ifc ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs=  3
P:  Vendor=05ac ProdID=1292 Rev= 0.01
S:  Manufacturer=Apple Inc.
S:  Product=iPhone

Alternatives:

• Mounting using SSH/SFTP over ADHOC wifi connection
• iTunnel using modified libiphone

Links:

• http://brandy25.blogspot.com/2009/02/mount-iphone-in-linux-via-usb.html
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PortableDevices/iPhone

A small script to mimic a bit the GNOME GVFS auto mounting function:

#!/bin/sh
 
mntp=/home/johan/mnt/iPhone
 
if ! ( mount | grep $mntp ); then
   mkdir -p $mntp
   mount.fuse.ifuse -afc2 none $mntp -s
   notify-send -u normal "iPhone Mounted" "The iPhone is now mounted."
   nautilus $mntp
else
   fusermount -u $mntp
   rmdir $mntp
   notify-send -u normal "iPhone Un-Mounted" "The iPhone is now un-mounted."
fi