jailbreaking the iPhone for UNIX geeks – part 1
For all of us UNIX geeks who purchased and love their iPhones, undoubtedly you have read about or heard about ‘jailbreaking’. At first it was a very complicated and possibly dangerous procedure to undertake, making it’s value questionable at best. But over time the jailbreak process for a 1.1.3 firmware iPhone, has finally matured to a ‘1-click-solution’. It’s reached a point where it’s easily done and also easily undone, so I decided to take the plunge and jailbreak my iPhone.
Sadly, I must preface the content of this post with the following statement:
I AM IN NO WAY RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR IPHONE. JAILBREAKING WILL VIOLATE WARRANTIES AND SUCH, IF YOU CHOSE TO DO IT, YOU DO IT AT YOUR OWN RISK.
I am not going to go in depth into the actual jailbreak process, as I said earlier it’s a ‘1-click-solution’. I used the application called ZiPhone, available in both Windows and OSX versions, are available for download here. The method that I used, as I am a legitamite AT&T subscriber, was ‘Jailbreak’ only; if you are like me, there is no need to Active, or Unlock your iPhone. READ the included documentation, it’s straight forward and simple, however if anything goes wrong, see my disclaimer and their troubleshooting section.
Ok now that I got the boring ‘don’t sue me if you screw it up’ stuff out of the way and you have successfully jailbroken your iPhone .. what do you do with it now?
*** Useful Tip: ***
set your Auto-Lock timer to NEVER, while you are performing the below installs.
If you read the ZiPhone documentation as any good UNIX geek does (yeah right). The first (and most important) thing you should do after a successful jailbreak, is head straight over to the shiny new Installer.app that has been placed on your home screen and install the BSD Subsystem. It’s required for most jailbroken apps to run correctly, if not at all. From the Installer.app tap the Install bread crumb, then scroll down to the System category, the BSD Subsystem installer should be located in there.
Now that the BSD Subsystem is installed, if you are running the 1.1.3 firmware, there are a few other things that you should do to make everything work as expected. From Installer.app tap the install bread crumb, scroll down to the Tweaks (1.1.3) category and install the SUID Lib Fix.
I checked out my system to make sure everything worked as I expected, all was fine except the ‘locate me’ portion of google maps. However, this is an easy fix. Back to Installer.app we go .. tap the Install bread crumb, and scroll down to the Network category. Scroll down till you find the Navizon GPS app and install it. A new app called Navizon will be placed on your home screen, if you run it, it will ask you to setup and account, you can try it out if you want, I didn’t. Simply installing and uninstalling the Navizon app, fixed the location feature in google maps (ymmv).
At this point, you now have a fully functional Jailbroken iPhone, with the BSD Subsystem installed. You should be able to reboot, hard reset, sync etc with no noticeable change in functionality.
If you did not read the alert message that popped up after you installed the BSD Susbsytem, I will repeat it for you now:
DO NOT – I REPEAT – DO NOT USE passwd to change the root or mobile user account passwords. It is currently broken, and will cause springboard to crash over and over and trust me, this will not end well if you try it.
In my next post, I will cover installing and configuring OpenSSH, Mobileterminal.app, changing root/mobile user account passwords (without using passwd), changing the default shell to zsh (or whatever your preferred shell environment is) and a few other fun things.