Fedora and iPhone 6? Challenge accepted.

Updated: September 14, 2015

More Fedora. Yes. Just a couple of days after showing you that Fedora 22 actually works, now that it's been fixed and polished and such, I am going to revisit an older topic, and that is one of the iPhone 6 support in Linux. If you recall my original article slash guide, in which I demonstrated how to connect your iPhone, should you have one, in Linux, I said it works in any and every distro. And while tutorial used Kubuntu as its baseline, it was pretty much universal.

One of my readers decided to disagree and berated me for doing a Ubuntu-only article. As the French say, challengeux accepteur. Well, today, I am going to show you that the exact same steps taken in the previous guide also work for Fedora. Let there be no doubt. Like the music band. Sort of. After me.

Teaser

1. Get the right software

To make things even more interesting and challenging, I decided to do this test twice. Once, on physical hardware, and the second time with Fedora running as a virtual machine inside VirtualBox on top of Windows. And even so, this is gonna work like pro.

dnf install ifuse libplist libplist-python libimobiledevice-utils libimobiledevice-devel libimobiledevice usbmuxd

Wait! You may say the list of package is slightly different. Yes, it is. In some cases, the naming convention used by Red Hat and Debian systems may not be the same. But then, all my tutorials so far have been geared toward helping you develop the right technical intuition to solve problems. In this case, let's look at what we need to know to be able to resolve the problem.

For instance, the Kubuntu list from the original guide reads libplist2 python-plist among several required packages. In this case, just search for plist using dnf. The obvious choices will show in the results, including libplist libplist-python. Makes sense, no? Now, for openSUSE the exact same logic applies. Fish, teach, feed, one day, all that.

Search for packages

2. Connect iPhone

Check dmesg, it should appear in the kernel log:

usb 1-2: USB disconnect, device number 4
usb 1-2: new full-speed USB device number 5 using ohci-pci
usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=05ac, idProduct=12a8
usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 1-2: Product: iPhone
usb 1-2: Manufacturer: Apple Inc.
usb 1-2: SerialNumber: fbce270d9b12474375f91bf02824ce8580af268b
ipheth 1-2:4.2: Apple iPhone USB Ethernet device attached
usbcore: registered new interface driver ipheth

3. Pair the device

The next step, just like we did the first time:

Paired

4. Mount & use

And again, the same old tricks like before:

Working, device paired and in use

Conclusion

There you go, job done. You can use iPhone 6 in all Linux distributions. The only limiting factor will be how easy the distro makes it for its users to grab the right packages. But if they are available in the repos, which they should be for most major operating systems, then you should be fine. Most importantly, the steps outlined in the tutorial work for Fedora just as well as they for Kubuntu and friends.

Of course, it's better to have a distro take care of this on its own. And we have seen Trusty and Xubuntu Vivid handle this particularly well. But in the absence of sensible coding and user friendliness, which seems to be the case with most recent Plasma desktops, at least when it comes to iPhone, you have a manual method to overcome the problem. Thus endeth another of Dedoimedo's tutorial. Say what you will, but baketh half-arsed tutorials he doth not. I hope you find this little howto useful. Ze end.

Cheers.