iTunes under Virtualization

I generally do not update my iPhone on a regular basis thru iTunes since there isn’t a native iTunes client on Ubuntu , iTunes even under XP is a generally buggy s/w. Since I did not want to jailbreak my iPhone I ended up running a XP image inside VirtualBox under Hardy. Now this was working fine until recently when the latest iTunes 9.2 update came out. Apple for some reason decided to crash iTunes if virtualization was underway over here. Now this I realized pretty late until after I had made multiple images of my WinXP and after several unsuccessful attempts to get iTunes going on each of these multiple images. I even tried to get Vista to play nice, but the Vista iso itself had issues, so had to call it a day there.

Coming back to the issue at hand, the quick fix for this was to revert back to an older version of iTunes, I mean who really cares about an iTunes update anyway. I use iTunes for transferring music to the iPhone because Apple makes me do so (unless I jailbreak), but that’s all I really do with iTunes. No Podcasts/Video, nothing. But the catch over reverting back to an older iTunes version is that apparently iTunes uses a library file called (you’ll never guess this one !! ) ‘iTunes Library’, now this file gets timestamped with the latest date that it was generated by iTunes and the version of iTunes used to generate it. And this file isn’t exactly backward compatible too, so several attempts to replace the existing lib with the older lib didn’t work either. Finally the easiest fix for this was to simply delete the lib itself and have iTunes regenerate it. Yes, I do lose my playlist info and stuff, but that’s ok, I was booting up from a fresh XP iso anyway.

But all said and done at the end of the day the only reason am still going to stick with the iPhone over Droid phones is since the G37 has a complete iPod interface and I intend to make full use of that without buying another iTouch for the same. I did try to do an update today after several months since I needed a backup of my Contact List after I switch to the iPhone 4.