I was recently bought an iTunes voucher, which I could have spent on an app for my ipad. I decided to buy some music from the iTunes Store. I just needed to download it onto my Linux laptop, preferably without any DRM, so that I could transfer it to my iPod.
Apple doesn't produce a version of iTunes for Linux, so I had to run the Windows version. At this point I should say that if you are hoping to connect iTunes to an iPod or iPhone using USB, this guide is not going to help you. You will either have to dual boot to Windows, or run Windows in a virtual machine using Virtualbox or something similar. I only needed to connect to the iTunes music store and download my music.
Linux does have a Windows compatibility layer, called Wine. I used a piece of software called PlaysOnLinux, which is a front end to Wine; it makes the job of setting up and managing Windows software much easier.
I am running Elementary Luna OS, which is a respin of Ubuntu 12.04. I didn't use the version of PlayOnLinux from the Ubuntu repository; instead I used the up to date version from the PlayOnLinux website (https://www.playonlinux.com/en/) and installed it as per the instructions.
Then I needed a version of iTunes to install. I went for version 10.3.1 (http://www.oldapps.com/itunes.php?old_itunes=82), which I knew would allow me to download purchased content. There is a script on the PlaysOnLinux website, which installs iTunes, so I ran that, pointed it at the downloaded installer, and off it went.
This seems to work fine, but the script set up iTunes to work with an older version of Wine, and this seems to throw up error messages quite often. I opened PlaysOnLinux and configured the iTunes application to use the newer system version of Wine.
The result is a working version of iTunes that downloads most of my purchased content as DRM-free 256kbps AAC files, which Banshee is quite happy to transfer to my iPod. I say most of, because one album downloaded as a 'protected' AAC file, which would play in iTunes, but couldn't be transferred.
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