How to charge an iPad?

Trying to charge my iPad with my Ubuntu 11.10 laptop (HP ProBook 5320m). It connects and I am able to download photos for instance. However battery doesn't charge at all. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Output of lspci | grep USB

00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 02)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)

I dig for a while and find out that original solution for iPad charge is not good enough. OpenSource community helped me to update it and currently this solution works for both i386 and amd64 architectures and supports lots of devices including iPad 3.

http://korenkov.info/pages/ipad-charge


This can be easily rectified as pestilence has already mentioned. I would like to simply provide an alternative way to install that you may find easier.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ipad-charge

Disconnect ipad, reboot and it should charge correctly.


Download the utility ipad_charge from http://www.rainbow-software.org/linux/ As of this writing, the version is 1.1. It works perfectly with the iPad 1 and Ubuntu 11.10. You'll need to install libusb-1.0-0-dev:

sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0 libusb-1.0-0-dev

Then go to the directory where you downloaded ipad_charge

tar zxvf ipad_charge_1.1.tar.gz
cd ipad_charge-1.1
make && sudo make install

From the README:

This installs ipad_charge to /usr/bin and 95-ipad_charge.rules to /etc/udev/rules.d. The udev rule automatically enables charging when an iPad is connected.

Simply running ipad_charge with no arguments enables charging on all connected iPads. Running with argument --off disables charging. If you want to control only one device, set environment variables BUSNUM and DEVNUM, e.g.: $ BUSNUM=004 DEVNUM=014 ipad_charge --off


Lots of information available to describe why it doesn't charge, or why charging is so slow from Ubuntu versus Windows. There are some Ubuntu .deb packages and/or source code floating around which apparently help, though I've not personally tried. For example, see the information from these locations:

  • http://ubuntuguide.net/how-to-charge-ipad-on-ubuntu-linux-via-usb-ports
  • http://www.knowswhy.com/why-is-ipad-not-charging/