Kishore Vancheeshwaran
Connect ipad on Arch Linux
292 words | 2 min read

Go through the arch wiki for iOS. Important that your ipad is unlocked before you follow the steps below. When you connect your ipad, it will ask whether you trust the device which is connected.

Steps I followed

 1which idevicepair # just a check
 2yay -S libimobiledevice ifuse # install relevant libraries
 3systemctl status usbmuxd.service # will be active now
 4idevicepair list # initially will not show the devices
 5sudo systemctl restart usbmuxd.service # will take a while
 6idevicepair list # will show the uuid of the device
 7sudo mkdir -p /media/ipad
 8sudo chmod 777 /media/ipad
 9ifuse /media/ipad # now the ipad is mounted at /media/ipad
10fusermount -u /media/ipad # to unmount the ipad

I am using this to transfer documents from my PC to my ipad. Sadly, I’m not able to see the added documents in my ipad after disconnecting, even though I can see it in my ipad through my file explorer in PC. If you have any suggestion how to do so, please let me know.

For now I’ll just use python’s httpserver to transfer between my PC and ipad. Or the other way is to use my windows machine in my virtualbox to use itunes (untested).

UPDATE: After some exploration I see that there is a file /media/ipad/Books/Purchases/Purchases.plist which contains the list of entries of the books available on the ipad. When I removed it (after a backup) I saw that I’m not able to see any book in my ipad even though they exist there. What’s more interesting is that I’m not able to access the books through the files app either. This is a frustrating black box that I’m not able to understand at this point of time.

Some references:

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