jmoiron.net

Upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 did not go quite as planned tonight; software all downloaded, installed, and checked out, and when it came time to reboot, the rebooting failed.

There were lots of insults added to this injury. Ubuntu seems to have modified my root password as part of the upgrade, and it insists on a password to drop into the management shell or to enter single user mode. X11 refused to function on my old kernel setup (which was booting fine), and there didn't seem to be a way to boot up into a text login. Finally, I couldn't figure out what the error was even in recovery mode, because usplash (or have they replaced that, already?) tried and failed to start and wiped the text in my buffer.

So that wasn't fun! A helpful gent on #ubuntu told me about init=/bin/bash, which friends tell me is an old sysadmin trick, reminding me just how long I've been out of that game; last time I was a sysadmin my boss laughed at me for suggesting we use Linux instead of Solaris.

Finally resetting the root password, I was able to drop into the shell to see that some filesystem wasn't mounting properly. Oddly, my raid0 os-drive and my raid5 data partitions were fine: the problem ended up being a line in my fstab:

# iphone line from gentoo wiki
# http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Syncing_an_iPhone_with_iTunes_in_a_VM
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=664 0 0

As it mentions in the comment there, this was some kind of usbfs incantation to get VirtualBox & the iPhone to work together. After I removed that, things booted smoothly. After things booted smoothly, I noticed that my charging iPhone was being mounted several times in 10.04, but with some icons I wasn't used to. Nautilus opened up, and claiming that I had plugged in a media player.

So I poked around, and lo, Ubuntu 10.04 supports the iPhone. Not only that, but you can use its default access mode to copy music off of the iPhone; there are some features that only open source could ever deliver. I have a significant hatred for iTunes and it's definition of 'sync' which includes 'delete everything off of your device', but it's unlikely I'll ever be able to upgrade firmware or perform full backups (contacts, apps, etc) from anything but, so I'll probably stick to my still functional VirtualBox method.