Dec 19, 2010 08:01 GMT  ·  By

The following tutorial will teach GNOME, Ubuntu, and other Linux users how to manage the icons (SpringBoard) on their Apple iPhone 3G, 3Gs, or iPhone 4 devices. The tutorial was tested with an iPhone 3Gs phone, on the Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system.

As you all probably already know, iPhone devices are supported in Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) or Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), all thanks to an amazing library called libimobiledevice.

The SpringBoard is the screen where all of your installed applications are displayed. You can easily rearrange the icons on your iPhone device if you hold your finger on an icon, for a few seconds, until they start jiggle.

But, if you want to manage the SpringBoard icons on your Linux operating system, you can do that with the SBmanager application. And, today's tutorial we will teach how to install this application, tested on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system.

Download the SBmanager application from here, double click the file and install it. Enter your password when asked, and wait for the installation to finish. You can close Ubuntu Software Center when the installation ended.

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Now connect you iPhone, and open SBmanager from Applications -> Accessories...
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The application will immediately load your SpringBoard icons and you will be able to rearrange them as you like...
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Don't forget to save before closing the app. That's it!

Of course, these days you can do a lot more in Linux with your iPhone, like sharing music, videos, podcasts, audiobooks, or updating, backing up, restoring the iOS operating system, activate your device, access the filesystem, share documents and manage files, use USB Internet tethering, use TCP tunneling, install, uninstall and archive applications, and many more. So expect more iPhone tutorial from us!