Though I don’t have an iPad (required for the textbooks), I was still interested in trying to upgrade iBooks to version 2.0.  The Corona jailbreak on Cydia version 1.0-5 announced that it had fixed the iBooks issue.  Hooray!

Problem is, since iBooks didn’t work after applying the 5.0.1 untethered jailbreak, I decided to apply “iBooks Fix 2″ from Cydia. Essentially that moved the iBooks application from the mobile user Applications space to the root user Applications space.  Simply uninstalling “iBooks Fix 2″ (which I did) doesn’t undo that.  So how to fix it?  Manually delete the entire “iBooks” folder from /Applications using iFile, and re-spring.  Then, I was able to install iBooks 2 with iTunes, and it now works as normal.

So in sum:

1. Install Corona 1.0-5 or higher (can be installed over redsn0w or Pwnage Tool jailbreaks for untethered iOS 5.0.1)
2. Uninstall iBooks Fix 2
3. Delete iBooks from /Applications with iFile & re-spring
4. Install iBooks 2.0 with iTunes

In other news, iTunes 10.5.3 has been deemed jailbreak safe, and I can attest that it synced a cracked app.

I’d been holding out for an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5, as a tethered jailbreak was never of any use to me. iOS 4.3.2 was nice and stable and trouble-free. Aside from Mint, which required iOS 5 for some crazy reason, I had no real reason to upgrade to iOS 5 anyway. The new notification center was attractive, but I already had it with jailbreak tweaks like Notified Pro. But I knew I’d need to upgrade eventually, if only for iCloud by Summer 2012 when MobileMe is slated for execution, R.I.P.

The Promise of Siri on iPhone 4 Sweetens the Pot

But then a few days ago I learned of the legal Siri port for iPhone 4, Spire. (I didn’t yet know it was going to be such a pain to get working that it wasn’t really worth the bother.) And then the next day Pod2G’s untethered jailbreak was released. So it was time to give it a go.

I’ll spare the blow by blow, but it was not a smooth upgrade. Here’s some of what I encountered:

Cannot Restore from iPhone OS 4 backup

• I made a custom firmware, preserving my 1.59.00 baseband on my iPhone 4, using redsn0w 0.9.10b1. Then I jailbroke also using the same version of redsn0w. iTunes threw me an error 1600 (some kind of unknown error), which turned out to be because I had blocked connections to Apple in my hosts file. I had forgotten about that. And then the USB connection was really touchy, and I had to unplug all other USB devices and leave my keyboard and the phone directly connected to the Mac.

• After fixing those issues, a restore completed, but then iTunes crashed between finishing the restore and activating the phone, so I was left with only the choice to set up a new phone. I did this and also found the phone hadn’t been activated. (I’m on AT&T contract.) I found a way to get iTunes to “forget” that it had set a phone, in order to force it to restore from my last iOS 4 backup. Unfortunately after doing so I was just asked to “Set Up New Phone” again. Still no restore from backup option. To make matters worse, both the “Restore” and “Upgrade” buttons in iTunes were grayed out. Furthermore, Cydia’s servers were hammered so I couldn’t even install any needed tools like iSSH. Oh well, I hadn’t wasted too much time yet, so let’s try jailbreaking again.

Second try with PwnageTool 5.0.1

• This time I used PwnageTool 5.0.1. Again I didn’t allow the baseband upgrade, and I unchecked the “Activate” box in advance settings – because that really means “hacktivate” (and it should be called that). I’m on an official carrier contract. I also used the advanced mode to pre-install iSSH and a couple other packages, in case I had trouble with Cydia.

• The second attempt “worked” and did allow me to restore my old iPhone OS 4.x backup. But not without glitches. I was getting Error 1600 or 1604 from iTunes, again, and so again had to unplug USB hubs, etc. As expected, iTunes skipped over my cracked IPAs, leaving a springboard mess to sort out later. Cydia servers were still hammered, and so I had to fight to get in, just to get PKGBackup, so I could restore old Cydia packages and sources. I was careful not to restore anything stupid – like AppSync for OS 4 when there is an AppSync for iOS 5+ instead. Or Frash, which hasn’t worked in some time.

Post Jailbreak Problems

• But still there were problems and conflicts. I checked this compatibility list. Backgrounder got installed and that turned out to be causing crashes. Once removed that was fine. Other packages I removed just in case included: SpringFlash with it’s SBSettings toggle, Safari Download Manager, and Push Notifications SBSettings toggle.

As of this post I have two big remaining, unsolved problems, which seem quite common if not universal (to those who just applied some form of the untethered jailbreak):

1. iBooks doesn’t work.

I realize there are “fixes” for it, such as “iBooksFix2” on Cydia, but so far they don’t satisfy. They involve moving iBooks to the root /Applications folder, when it is supposed to be an iTunes-installed app. What if there are updates? Holding out for a better solution.

2. the 1/4 size screen issue on every boot.

Again, I realize there is a tempory fix: enter safe mode, open an affected application, then restart. But apparently you must do this after every reboot. Seriously? Hopefully @rpetrich can come up with a fix, and generally fix other problems with Activator on iOS 5.

Edit: rpetrich replied in a tweet: “unrelated to Activator”. So cause remains unknown.

Corona makes retrying easy!

In an effort to resolve issue #1, I installed the Corona 5.0.1 Untether jailbreak version “1.0-3″ from Cydia. I checked first and learned that could be installed on top of the PwnageTool 5.0.1 or the redsn0w 0.9.10b1 jailbreak, and is presumably the same as redsn0w 0.9.10b2. All of those flavors aimed to fix an issue with launchctrl. But rumor had it that it fixed iBooks too. Sadly that wasn’t the case.

The nice thing about this new exploit is that it can be tweaked, as with Corona, without a need for a complete restore. It’s sort of sitting on top of iOS 5.0.1. Hopefully the problems will get ironed out in due time.

Other Notes

• The version of MobileTerminal I had restored crashes. Get the “520″ version (from xsellize source among others I think) instead.

• Some app store apps that worked before no longer work, even though they’re at the current version. Instapaper and RSS Flash G both get interface lockups. These aren’t resolved by force quitting the app in question. A couple of others crash at launch.

• It’s sure nice of iTunes to now continue to restore application settings and documents even if it gets interrupted during the initial restore process. This makes the script I wrote to restore app settings/docs from an rsync backup no longer really needed as long as this continues to work. But better to always make a full rsync backup before a firmware upgrade anyway, just in case.

• I had gotten used to being able to connected to my phone without needing to type a password, via SSH using Terminal on my Mac. I described how to set up authorized keys in step 4C in the script comments posted on the link above. But now on iOS 5 I get the error: “.ssh/authorized_keys: No such file or directory”. As advised, I made the “.ssh” on the phone root. I even tried creating that file first (with touch), but got the same error. If anyone knows why please let me know.

• iOS 5 now has the ability to set some alert sounds to ringtones. This makes the tweak I described here mostly unnecessary, though there may still be sounds I want to change.

Update/Edit

Indeed, it does look like 1.0-5 version of Corona fixes the iBooks problem.  See this new post.  The quarter screen issue seems to have gone away after one reboot at least. Since I upgraded Activator and Corona and SBSettings at the same time, it’s hard to know what may have fixed it.

However, note that as of now there’s no definitive word from the jailbreak devs about how iTunes 10.5 may work with future jailbreaks.  Several other blogs are reporting that it seems safe, but still to wait.  This is a typical statement:

 If you’re going to be updating to iOS 5 tomorrow, update to iTunes 10.5 today. (Jailbreakers, we don’t expect any trouble but air on the side of caution and let others test the waters first.)

In other news, for those who feared that an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5 was not possible, there may still be hope.  This is whatiOn1c  had to say on twitter:

As far as I know iOS 5 untether is covered by other people already. Guess who :p

In a related note, please be advised that from initial reports, it may prove to be technically i possible to achieve a untethered jailbreak with iOS 5. This would be sad news for me, because a tethered jailbreak is simply not feasible; I need to be able to reboot my phone away from my computer.  Let’s hope our jailbreak heros find another exploit!

Now we just await that damn iOS 4.3 and hopefully a working jailbreak/unlock in short order.  Still on iOS 4.01 here and it’s feeling oooooold.

Now that there is such a great variety of jailbreak methods in the wild, it’s hard to say that it (or any other iTunes release from now on) is definitely ok across the board.  So if you take the plunge, make a backup first of your whole iTunes library (not the media files, the library files in only).  Also, if you have a Mac, there have been reports that the Software Update version of iTunes 10.1.1 was causing crashes (unrelated to jailbreak).  However, the stand-alone installer is fine.

All that said, I took the leap, and can report that it appears jailbreak-safe in that AppSync 4 still works and installs apps. My iPhone 4 is still at iOS 4.0.1 with jailbreakme.com jailbreak.  That’s about as far as I can say at this point, though.

Proceed with caution and backup first.

However, please note that some have reported issues with synching apps, and I’ve also seen one report of a failure to do a new jailbreak using limera1n and iTunes 10.1.  So caution is in order, and as usual, it’s a good idea to have a backup of all your iTunes database & library files (in ~/Music/iTunes/) for any previous version before you upgrade iTunes, in case you need to downgrade later.

Hopefully if there are in fact any issues with iTunes 10.1 and new jailbreaks, the dev whiz kids will work them out after iOS 4.2 comes out.  (Which is now rumored to be delayed by Apple until next week, due to wi-fi issues with the iPad.)

The same problems with not moving IPA files I reported earlier persist, though.

Unlike iTunes <10, .ipas that you double click on are not moved to the Mobile Applications folder as they were before. I suppose this might only affect those (like me) who do not have the “keep iTunes Music folder organized” option enabled.

My practice had been to double click on a downloaded .ipa on a volume I use for downloads, then trash it, as it had already been copied over to my boot drive by iTunes. Since I trashed these, the original file was no longer found. If you don’t trash the file, the reference remains to the original location, where ever it is. Again I suppose this is meant to make the “keep Music folder organized” option more consistent, so I wouldn’t call it a bug. But it’s a big change that I imagine affects a lot of jailbreakers who take advantage of trial .ipas.

For now this means I have to copy the .ipa to the Mobile Applications folder first before adding it, or else create a new folder to keep installed .ipas somewhere else.

iTunes 10 is safe for JBers+unlockers: DFU mode, syncing, selecting IPSW, all okay (Stay away from 4.1 next week though!)

Short, but sweet.  But as is the custom with these iTunes updates, lets test this first, shall we…

On that tip, I just installed it.  (The iTunes library has to be updated but thankfully that went very fast.)

I’m happy to report that I was able to install an .ipa from apptrackr just fine.  (Even backup went fast, not making a new backup, thankfully!)

It looks as if the jump in the iTunes version to 10 is more marketing and design-fucks than substance. And the app icon, ugg?!! Win XP!  The internal interface icons are a bit better but more “helvetica” basic, and will take a lot of getting used to.

This is a totally new kind of jailbreak it seems, but it is untethered.

The earliest versions broke facetime & MMS related to permissions, but that was corrected after about a day or two.  (Those who jailbroke using that method before comex fixed it can go to Cydia to have it auto-fixed.)  You could also repair the permissions manually.  Big Boss has a terminal fix as well involving changing permissions:

Using ifile or ssh, chmod 755 /var/mobile, chmod 755 /var/mobile/Library, chmod 755 /var/mobile/Library/Preferences. Then reboot and enable facetime in settings app.

This jailbreak may (will?) not work on an iPad 3.2.1.

After about a week of using it, I can report it’s mostly successful.  It was a very quick jailbreak that’s for sure.  Didn’t even need to reboot!  AppSync 4 from hackulo.us worded just fine also.

On the downside, we know it relies on a PDF exploit which is no fun to leave open and Apple will certainly close ASAP.  So next jailbreak (if any) won’t be that easy for sure. [edit: apple closed this hole with 4.02.  a jailbreaker's security patch for 4.01 was released shortly afterwards on cydia, meaning there's no reason to upgrade to 4.02]

Also, it seems a little less stable than PwnageTool jailbroken 3G.  Springboard crashes a fair bit, and into safe mode sometimes.  of course that might not be the jailbreak but other mods I’ve made over the past few days.

There is a pixel glitch on the boot screen that comex claims is a manifestation of code injection and nothing to worry about.  and we have no cause to doubt him.

In the past 24 hours a lot of vitriol has been thrown at GeoHot for apparently quitting the scene in a fit.  Personally I can’t say I blame him for reacting to a bunch of whiners who expected him to serve them in this way.  But this young genius also admitted to his own naivete when he said in his now-closed blog that “I didn’t fully realize most of the current scene don’t care unless they are getting something. Now I do.” It’s obvious that while it was fun for GeoHot because it was a challenge, a lot of people have come to rely on what he has provided.

Which brings me to the main point of this blog entry:  the damn cat.  Apple really has failed to realize that one of the reasons the iPhone is so cool is because it’s a great device that is capable of doing a lot more than Apple allows, and that its precisely the existence of jailbreak tools that makes a great many tens of thousands of customers want no other device.

I’ve written elsewhere:

I’ve been an Apple buyer and fan for decades, but have grown so tired of their lock-down mentality since the iPhones. They used to be a company about tinkering with tech, about all the fun mods you could make. Now they’re all about controlling the user experience. I wish they’d get over the cat and mouse game. Ignore the jailbreakers and don’t make it so hard to do. Their “new” end user base can enjoy their controlled experience in ignorant bliss, and the tinkerers can do what they will.

The point here is that the more difficult Apple makes it to jailbreak, the more desperate users (like me, and like you dear reader) become for it, the more irritated those who have the skills to provide it become, and the more resentful a lot of jailbreakers get.

But the odd thing is this resentment is directed towards the tiny group of jailbreak personalities (GeoHot for quitting, the dev-team for waiting to release), and not toward Apple, which deserves it so much more.  Apple has similarly mostly managed to deflect resentments from the end-user non-jailbreakers toward their network carriers (mostly AT&T) rather than at them for their product. (But this too may change as it becomes obvious that the iPhone 4 “grip of death” issue is not only their design flaw but not really fixable with software.)

It’s in Apple’s own interests to keep the cat & mouse game a game, but a game whose rules are not so stacked as to be unplayable.  The moment it becomes that, Apple will have turned tens of thousands of fans into people as irritated at them as they are at AT&T.  And that will be the beginning of the great decline.

You’ve heard the news that Apple is likely to release a new firmware version (4.0.1 most likely) within days to address some of the reported early issues, like the “death grip” and maybe the proximity sensor problem.  (It would be nice too if they quickly fixed issues with car head units as well, but we can only dream.) You don’t want to activate your iPhone 4 and have to set it all up again after a clean restore to a jailbroken 4.0.x firmware.

It’s pretty clear that the dev team won’t release a jailbreak until at least after Apple releases this bug fix, and then it will need to be tested, etc.  So it may still be awhile.

So what do you do in the meantime?

• Make sure you SHSH is backed up on Cydia with TinyUmbrella.  Like me, you may also be upgrading from an iPhone 3G, having skipped the 3GS generation, so this may all be rather confusing.  But starting with the iPhone 3GS, Apple implemented a signing system so that it is not possible to restore to an older firmware than the current one.  For the sordid story of this and a good rant, read what Saurik has to say about the issue. Backing up your SHSH guarantees that in the event the Apple finally wins a cat & mouse game with the jailbreakers, you can still go back to the last working jailbroken firmware on your current device.  You can and should do this NOW, before a jailbreak is even out.  The best tutorial I’ve thus far seen is here on jailbreaknews.

• Shop for a good case.  It’s been reported that using a case will resolve the “death grip” issue, and unfortunately the glass is more breakable than Apple was touting.  Personally, I want one that allows you to slide the bottom off to use with a dock, so I opted for Hard Candy’s Bubble Slider.  It remains to be seen whether they’ll actually ship the damn thing.  A lot of cases are not even available, but you can pick up a cheap silicon one on ebay that will suffice temporarily.  You might want to get a protector film.  Be careful with the cheapos as it seems that some of them have holes that aren’t lined up properly. I got a dud myself.

• Consider buying a micro-SIM adapter.  The iPhone4, like the iPad, is using a smaller SIM card which is essentially just a normal “mini” SIM card cut to a smaller size.  This would in theory allow you to activate your iPhone 4 now to play with, but pop out the iPhone 4 micro SIM card and use it in your old iPhone with the adapter until the jailbreak is out.  You can get a micro-SIM adapter from several suppliers in Europe for about $6 Euro or less.  You could also get one for $5 US, from a company which my guess, since they don’t say where they ship from, is in Hong Kong, so by the time it shows up it hopefully won’t matter.  If you hope (like me) for an eventual iPhone 4 soft unlock to use when traveling abroad, you’ll also need a way to cut normal “Mini-SIM” cards down to micro size, so you might consider getting a SIM cutter as well as a micro-SIM adapter. For $20 Euro you can get both.  Of course you could cut your own SIM, or make your own micro-SIM adaptor if you really want to measure and cut in millimeters.

I’ve tested it myself with an iPhone 3G on PwnageTool-jailbroken OS 3.1.2.  With that combination, at least, a cracked app synched just fine.

However, some are reporting that the Spirit jailbreak for the iPad cannot be applied with iTunes 9.2.  If your iPad is already jailbroken with Spirit, it is supposedly fine, but you won’t be able to jailbreak a non-jb’en iPad with Spirit using iTunes 9.2.

So if you’re intending to get an iPad within the next few weeks, hold off on updating iTunes.

According to iClarified, iTunes 9.1.1 is able to detect and remove the userland variety of jailbreaks. These are the ones, like “Spirit,” that can jailbreak the iPad.

The good news is that musclenerd of the dev team affirms that 9.1.1 does not break the dev teams tools (PwnageTool & RedSn0w) on iPhones.  While I have not confirmed this personally, I am about to upgrade based on that affirmation, and will edit this blog post if I see any issues.

So in sum, you have to be more cautious about upgrading iTunes now, considering what you might use in the future as well as what you use now.  We hope that our jailbreak lords will be able to patch current versions of iTunes (as well as the iPhone firmware) so we can enjoy the best of both worlds.

So I wrote What’s That Sound.  What’s That Sound is an AppleScript that will find all the sound files of extensions that you choose (.aif, .aiff, .mp3, .caf, etc) that are located within the .app folders of your iTunes-installed applications.  It doesn’t read directly from your iPhone, but rather from an rsync backup of your iPhone file system on your Mac. (It’s based on this script to restore app settings and documents from an rsync backup.)

As with that script its based on, to set this up you will need to:

1. install rsync with Cydia on your iPhone
2. run an rsync backup of your whole iPhone file system (terminal command and explanation are in script comments)*
3. edit and re-save the script after changing at least your backup path, and any other desired properties (all commented in the script)

* note that the full backup will take a long time — do it while away or at night, etc.

After doing the above, when you run the script you will be given a list of all sounds in your apps, which you can then play one-by-one on your Mac.  It will also log the file paths of the sounds played in case you want to locate them.

Download What’s that Sound

Version History

1.2 - 04/05/2010: added a couple more system locations, created extra dialog for locations
1.1 - 04/03/2010: added listing of stash/root apps & system sound files; added .m4r
1.0 - 03/31/2010: initial release

Note that some people have reported problems on the Mac, but they were resolved with a computer restart.  I recommend restarting immediately after installing iTunes 9.1.

If you jailbroke with blackra1n on Windows, there were known problems as of the day of iTunes 9.1′s release (3/30/2010). However, an unofficial (not by GeoHot) patch for it was released the same day.

If you jailbroke with blackra1n on a Mac, i can’t personally confirm that iTunes 9.1 will work, but I’ve seen no sensible reports that it doesn’t after a fair amount of looking around.  Same story with jailbreaking with dev-team tools on Windows.

It is now available on Cydia.

Please leave comments!

BB Black Metclam Categories Icons (version 1.2)

As usual, I prefer to update from scratch with PwnageTool. Although RedSn0w is no doubt easier, there is the issue that has never been answered properly in my mind about losing a whole 500 MB of storage space when upgrading due to the repartition.  There’s also the real risk of losing the ultrasn0w unlock with a baseband upgrade.

Tethering

One of the big concerns I had was losing the custom carrier settings that allowed tethering with AT&T.  The DevTeam released a patch which allowed you to install carrier settings for tethering on FW 3.1.2. But I was unable to get a definitive answer about whether this patch had been made part of PwnageTool 3.1.5, or whether it was possible even to apply it on FW 3.1.3 in any fashion.  So I chose to go to 3.1.2 instead of 3.1.3.

The best way to apply the patch mentioned above is provide here, with a patcher script you can install and run via SSH.  Then here is a page which provides the best carrier file I found that successfully enables tethering and also doesn’t kill visual voicemail, and also worked fine with 3.1.2.  That page gives steps related to the blackra1n jailbreak, but it worked just as well with the PwnageTool 3.1.5 jailbreak of firmware 3.1.2.

Tether Terminology Bitching

Let me take a moment to bitch about a dumb terminology issue.  The term “tethering” is being used as it has been for a long time – as a way to tether your mobile phone to your laptop to use it as a modem.  However a “tethered jailbreak” like blackra1n, means you must re-do the jailbreak after every reboot, which means your phone is “tethered” to your computer.  To me this is unacceptable, and the confusion is annoying because I need the first kind of tethering and will never accept the second kind.

Updating Application documents and settings

The script I wrote to upgrade to 3.0 still worked great, with a couple of additional steps for FW 3.1 and Mac OS X 10.6, as noted.

Restoring SMS Database

It should be noted that if you’ve done a full rsync backup, as explained in the above post, you have access to all sorts of goodies, including your old SMS database, which is located here:

/private/var/mobile/Library/SMS/

Restoring Cydia Applications

AptBackup is a joke.  If you don’t restore from an iTunes backup, you don’t have your Cydia list.  I found that out the hard way when upgrading to 3.0.  This time I tried a “manual” way, but unfortunately without much better luck.  This page explains how to generate a list of your cydia apps, which can be restored with another terminal command.  The first step worked great and generated the proper file, which is human-readable.  But unfortunately step 4 didn’t work.  I think it’s related to apt-get not being installed yet, but rather than muck around with it, I just used that list to reinstall everything truly manually from Cydia.  I know there is a paid Cydia app called pkgbackup, which I may spring for next time.

Annoying iTunes 9 issue with Categories

I was looking forward to using the iTunes 9 organizing features available only with iPhone FW 3.1+.  Unfortunately if you are hiding icons, it doesn’t work very well, as most (but not all??) of the hidden icons show up anyway.  Bummer.  So I recommend installing a bunch of apps you do want organized and using iTunes first, then installing ones you’re gonna hide (with Categories or otherwise).

Speaking of Categories

I made a big set of Categories icons.