Ubuntu: Up and Running

USB Media

You may have various storage devices connected (or sometimes connected) to your computer via USB, such as cameras, thumb drives, hard disk drives, and so on. All of these should be recognized by Ubuntu as soon as you connect them, after which they are then mounted in the filesystem and on the desktop.

You can usually drag and drop files in and out of the device’s folders, and in the case of cameras, you can delete the photos on the camera once you have copied them to your hard disk.

Note

A note about iPhones. In versions of Ubuntu prior to 10.04, iPhones only mounted the photo part of their memory because the iPod media files are encrypted. To handle them, some people have had success installing the Wine Windows interface and then installing the iTunes software. However, results vary due to different versions of iTunes, and often this method results in iTunes hanging or simply not recognizing the iPhone. The most success seems to come from running VirtualBox on Ubuntu, and then installing both Windows XP and iTunes. This is a long-winded approach just to run a single program, but see the following section.

What’s New in 10.04

Starting with Ubuntu 10.04, as well as mounting your iPhone’s photo folders using Nautilus, it will also let you browse the entire contents of your iPhone, including your apps, music and videos. What's more, the Rhythmbox music player now integrates with iPhones, working in a similar manner to the iTunes program. Hopefully this integration will stay and ...