“The Apple iPad is without question a wildly successful product
in a market space that’s seen many false starts. It seems like the
iPad was at the right place at the right time to scratch an itch we
didn’t know we had. Many wrote it off early on as just an expensive
ebook reader with too many limitations to replace your netbook,
much less a full-fledged business laptop.“Inquiring Linux minds want to know if they can make an iPad
work without a Mac or Windows box. The answer is a qualified yes.
You’ll need a copy of iTunes to do some functions like firmware
updating and transferring files to a specific application like
Apple’s iBooks ebook reader. You’ll also need it if you want to get
content from sources such as Apple’s iTunes University. We’ll look
at how you could do this using Oracle’s Virtualbox.“Syncing
“Syncing music and videos to the iPad is probably one of the
highest priority functions you’ll want to accomplish. For this task
we chose Banshee, although we did update to the latest version.
Banshee 1.8.0 recognized the iPad straight away and showed all the
music and videos currently on the device. Importing music from the
iPad is drop-dead, one-click simple. Once that’s done you can drag
music from your desktop / laptop to the iPad or set Banshee to keep
the two in sync.”