iPhone Jailbroken

March 26th, 2008

I just got an iPhone, and its great, but Apple does not allow 3rd party applications out of the box (games coming soon). So what to do? Well, if you want more apps, you must jailbreak your iPhone. Before Feb 2008, it was a bit complicated, but since apple released 1.1.4, its easy as apple pie – here’s what i did:

Following instructions from iPhone Atlas, I changed Settings/General/Auto-Lock=Never, downloaded and ran ziphone app on my mac, doing jailbreak-only (i’m already using the official AT&T carrier). It took less than a minute to reboot back into iPhone and there i saw 2 new apps – Zibri’s Blog and Installer. The Installer app is how you easily install your favorite games, utilities, and other apps. Hurray.

After browsing top 20 apps, I installed these (and you should too, copycat)

  1. Sources/Community Sources – do this first, gets list of available apps (packages).
  2. System/BSD Subsystem – some other apps need this first, including OpenSSH and NES. If you install this, change password from default “alpine” using openssl. Do not use passwd – you may get stuck in “edit home screen” reboot loop
  3. Games/Caissa Chess – better graphics than other chess
  4. Games/Chess – not sure if its better than Caissa
  5. Games/FiveDice – Yahtzee
  6. Games/HuaRongDao – puzzle game, simple yet hard
  7. Games/iCave – simple, reminds me of vanguard
  8. Games/iSolitaire – you know it
  9. Games/Labyrinth – tilt iPhone to guide marble around labyrinth
  10. Games/Mahjong – classic chinese game
  11. Games/Othello – another classic
  12. Games/PuzzleManiak – combo of different games, online scores
  13. Games/Sudoku – latest fad
  14. Games/Tris – one of many Tetris games
  15. Multimedia/CameraPro – like default Camera app, but you can zoom, black and white,
  16. Multimedia/MobileScrobbler – last.fm client
  17. Multimedia/TuneWiki – play music with this, and it downloads lyrics and advances them to the music
  18. Multimedia/iFlickr – upload to .. you guessed it
  19. Productivity/WebSearch – shortcut to searching on google, wikipedia, ebay
  20. Productivity/Sketches – like the old “paint” .. you can take a pic of your friend, give’m a mustache, then email it.
  21. Toys/Flashlight – very simple – get a bright screen to find those keys you dropped in the bar
  22. Utilities/iSpit (geeks only) – turn your iPhone to a simple HTTP server
  23. System/OpenSSH (geeks only) – lets you wirelessly connect to your iPhone like its a computer (copy/move/delete files, etc).
  24. System/Term-vt100 (geeks only) – get your xterm on. if you got login problems, try this vt100 fix.
  25. Development/Perl (geeks only) – installs perl 5.8.8-2

You got any cool apps? leave me a comment.

NOTES: More info on jailbreaking from crunchgear, from lifehacker, for iTouch, . If you can’t wait for Apple’s iPhone SDK, there’s already an O’Reilly iPhone Development book to help you write your own application.

ISSUES:

First time i did all this I ran into some issues, had to restore back to 1.1.4 (damn broken passwd). Second time was no issues – so you prolly won’t have any. But here’s notes on what happened to me in case it happens to you:

First was that calling/SMS didn’t work. On the ziphone app i clicked “Help & Info”, then Troubleshooting, and found the following which fixed it.

  1. Tap on Settings from the home screen.
  2. Choose General
  3. Choose Reset (all the way on the bottom)
  4. First try “Reset Network Settings” – The phone will reboot. If things still aren’t working, go back and try “Reset All Settings”.

Phone rebooted and now i saw my AT&T and Edge network logos again. Hurray!

The second issue was that the installer could not install anything, which turned out to be a temporary issue. The first time i ran installer, it updated itself (checking sources, refreshing sources, update, restart) .. which is normal. As soon as installer works, the internets say to install Sources/Community Sources, then System/BSD Subsystem, then System/OpenSSH. “Community Sources”, which contains list of things to install (games/utils/etc), installed OK, but i got stalled on BSD with a “Package Download Failed (null)” msg. I did alot of digging, found and did this troubleshooting checklist, but still no luck. Then i figured out I was in a temporary vortex – others noticed as well – and waited till the next morning when I had great success installing many packages.