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I have an iPhone languishing on my desk. Why? Because I've got my phone-book with my friends' details sitting on a Linux box in a MySQL table, and a separate out-of-sync listing embedded in my ancient Motorola V180. At some point last year I wiped my PC's hard drive and more or less fully converted to a Linux desktop, so I no longer have a working installation of Outlook 98 which used to give me a very limited mechanism for updating the contact list. The iPhone and pretty much every other vendor's notion of a contact manager (be it a PDA, cell phone, webmail account, sales-automation tool, whathaveyou) seems to be proprietary and patented to the hilt. Having just seen "Food Inc." I'm of a mind to write my Congressman to stop the monopolistic madness of all these Fortune 500 companies which wield their lawyers and intellectual-property nonsense over the rest of us. *However*, stepping back from the brink: how do y'all manage *your* contact info? Is there a sane way to keep your address book (defined as names, phone numbers and email addresses, maybe a few other fields) regularly copied (sync'ed may be too strong of a word) in either direction between a Linux box and an iPhone? I would have solved this myself with Google but the best I could come up with was a VirtualBox "solution" involving special kernel hacks and a stock install of XP with iTunes, and probably a pirate copy of Outlook--if I go down that path I'll find myself in the same hell I did when I tried to run MythTV on an ATI-based motherboard. It'd be simpler to program a robot's fingers to just retype my address list into the iPhone's native UI. -rich
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