Recently my wife bought me an iPhone. I love thing and already am finding it hard to imagine how I lived without it.

For a while now, we have been using my iPod (with a tuner attachment) to play my extensive mp3 collection through our main stereo system in the lounge room. This has been ok to a point, but when we are outside at the bbq or spa the reception is just not good enough. The iPhone however has a remote application that allows you to remotely access iTunes installed on your computer. This gave me an idea.

I’m not a Windows user, haven’t been for a long time however the idea I had involved installing Windows on an old pc I have without a monitor. So I pulled her out (8G hard drive and all) installed a wireless card, plugged her into my current monitor and installed XP. From here, the process was simple.

  • Right click on ‘My Computer’ and enable ‘Remote Desktop’. Shutdown & take the pc out to the lounge room, plugging it into the stereo. Restart.
  • Back in my office, log into Debian and install rdesktop & samba.


apt-get update && apt-get install rdesktop samba

I already have all my mp3s stored within ~/var/mp3s on my Linux machine. I’m simply going to share this directory with windows. Configure samba to do so…

[mp3s]
comment = Mp3s
path = /home/thorpe/var/mp3s
writeable = yes
browseable = yes
guest ok = no
printable = no

Restart samba….

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

I run my own local dns server via dnsmasq so I have no problem accessing any of my machines by name, if your following along, you may want to use ip addresses.

  • Log into the windows machine.


rdesktop -u username -p password -f -r sound:remote lounge-pc.lcl

The -f switch puts you in full screen mode while the -r switch disables the audio being sent to the client.

  • Map your shared drive to the M: drive


net use m: \\oblivion.lcl\mp3s

  • Install iTunes and add M: to your library

    • Install the remote application for your iPhone

Enjoy! Now I have a remote control on my iPhone that uses wifi to control iTunes from anywhere in my house. I can also login to this machine whenever I need to do maintenance (or update the iPhone even?) without having to drag it out and hook up any monitor.