hi folks!

i’m a little bit angry. angry about proprietary software. especially products you need for your hardware, which were not cheap. i’m talking about my iphone and the software is, yeah you know it already, itunes. i’m not willing to be forced to buy a proprietary operating system for a free tool (itunes) i need to communicate with the purchased hardware (iphone). so i’ve decided to try my best with wine. i’ve heard that wine has solved its teething troubles and it’s now ready for the big world. hehe, you wish … but here the whole story and all my steps to my spoilage:

first i’ve tried the easy way, installing wine from the repository. so i wrote this to my sources.list:

• deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt intrepid main

now a simple “apt-get install wine” was everything i need to start up. “download the newest itunes and install it”, was my next thought. but hey, that would be to simple. and for true, “wine iTunesSetup.exe” went completely wrong. the installation process didn’t even really start, and i got the message “the installer encountered errors before itunes could be configured”!?

so it was necessary to gain on some useful informations. this howto [1] helped me to find older versions of itunes. on oldapps [2] i tried some of them. till to the version 7.7.1 i had no success. but this version has no remote function for the iphone, and my first intention was not fulfilled. back to the start.

so i searched at the winehq homepage for more hints, and i found a patch for the current wine version [3,4]. this patch should permit the installation of the newest itunes. after downloading the sources of wine [5], applying the patch and installing all development packages for compiling [6] i’ve started the compiler … i was curious, really expecting the best. but everything turned out differently. it was really odd, the installation process finished successfully, but after executing itunes for the first time – surprise, surprise – there were no icons!!! no play-icon/button, no small icons at the left sidebar, no buttons, nothing. so i tried to change the configuration of direct3D (winecfg), but nothing happened – again no icons appeared!

i’m gutted … 😡 … welcome back, dear vmware!

[1] mini howto – itunes on ubuntu
[2] oldapps
[3] itunes8 on winehq
[4] itunes8.1 on winehq
[5] github wine
[6] building 32-bit wine on a 64-bit system – the easy way