iPhone OS 3.1.2 and Blackra1n

13. October 2009 · 1 comment · Categories: Apple, howto, iPhone, Troubleshooting · Tags: , ,

So the other week, Apple released the latest version of the firmware for the iPhone, OS 3.1.2. Not really a lot in the way of fixes:

  • Resolves sporadic issue that may cause iPhone to not wake from sleep
  • Resolves intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart
  • Fixes bug that could cause occasional crash during video streaming

However, always the optimist and hoping that maybe this update would fix the ever-present crashing Mobile Safari, and not needing to worry about needing to unlock (ever), I updated my 3G as soon as a jailbreak was available.

The update itself went smoothly, or rather, the restore did. Your best bet, with any new release of the iPhone, is to do a full Restore, and never an upgrade. This will help with performance and battery life, whereas you’re likely to have problems with an upgrade.

As soon as the Restore was finished, and after iTunes happily activated my phone, I downloaded Blackra1n, a jailbreak app by Geohot. The instructions are simple:

  1. Upgrade your phone to 3.1.2 – Note: THIS WILL UPGRADE YOUR BASEBAND! As such, you loose, possibly permanently, the ability to use Ultrasn0w, the Carrier Unlock.
  2. Run Blackra1n.
  3. Connect your iPhone
  4. Click “Make it ra1n”.

Simple, right? Well, sort of.

After you click “Make it ra1n”, your phone restarts in Recovery Mode (not DFU mode!) and you should see a picture of Geohot. However, if you have an iPhone 3G, that isn’t likely to happen. Instead, you’ll most likely see the iPhone Recovery Mode logo and Blackra1n stuck on the “Running” message. If you disconnect you’re iPhone Blackra1n will say it completed successfully, however the phone will remain in Recovery Mode. To exit, simply hold Power+Home until the screen goes black, then turn it back on.

If you check the log file Blackra1n creates in the same folder it’s run from, you’ll notice lines like:

ERROR: usb open failed while sending command

ERROR: usb open failed while sending payload

This means that no, you’re phone isn’t jailbroken. Fortunately, it’s not bricked – just reboot it and all will be well.

So, how do you fix this problem? Unfortunately you don’t. There are sites that tell you to put Blackra1n in the root of the C drive, and others that remind you to Run as Administrator, and some that say to use XP vs. Windows 7, or the other way around. The short of it is, though, it’s all crap.

I eventually got Blackra1n to work simply by running it over-and-over.

  1. Try it.
  2. It fails.
  3. Reboot phone in to normal mode (hold Power+Home until screen goes black, then turn back on normally)
  4. Repeat.

After around the 20th try, it finally completed and jailbroke the phone. Lesson learned? When all else fails, keep trying.

Move over Cydia, Icy is…nevermind. – Updated

30. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: iPhone, Rants · Tags: , , , ,

So there’s been a lot of buzz of the last few days about Icy, a new project from RipDev. Icy uses the same repositories as Cydia, but makes use of sqlite and libcurl instead of APT. The concept is there, but is it ready, in first-release form, to completely replace Cydia on my iPhone?

Yes, it has a stunning interface, it’s blazingly fast, and the animation that goes with package installations is beautiful, but it falls short in several ways.

Previews: One of the best features of Cydia – most package/theme authors include screenshots of their works behind a More Info or Screenshot link. Icy, for whatever reason, doesn’t parse these links making it impossible to see what you’re downloading. You also don’t get any information about the package that isn’t in the first page summary.

Changes: One of my favourite features of Cydia is the Changes tab, which lets you see new packages that have been added since you last launched the app. This feature makes it much easier to browse themes, especially if you have multiple repositories added – without it, the task of sorting though 1,200+ packages in one category to determine which ones you’ve already seen is a major task.

Category Listings: For a first release, Icy ships with a major bug – some users, myself included, were met with an empty categories tab on the first launch. For some people, restarting the phone fixed it, but in my case the only thing that works to get the categories to appear is to refresh the sources list multiple times. I had to do this each time I opened the app.

Seach: Icy’s package searching leaves a lot to be desired. A search for ‘Winterboard’ in Cydia results in a plethora of themes, whereas Icy returns no results as of my last half-dozen attempts.

So the final verdict? Icy is a nice attempt at replacing Cydia, but it still has a long ways to go. Cydia may take a very long time to load up, but it’s still tops in my book.

Update: Icy v1.1 was released today, and it appears to taken care of almost all of my concerns! The categories issue seems to be resolved, and there’s now a blue arrow on the package description page that take you to the package description page you see in Cydia, with links to screenshots, more info, et al…. The only thing that doesn’t seem to work is the Recent Packages in the Categories list (the equivalent to ‘Changes’ in Cydia), but with any luck that will be resolved shortly. Once the next version is out, I’ll do a full review.