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