Easing the jailbreak upgrade – aptbackup

Anytime you upgrade a jailbroken iPhone, you have to reinstall all of the jailbroken apps (iTMS apps and settings are retained).  While there is no way to completely automate restoring the jailbroken apps and settings, aptbackup will automatically reinstall any Cydia apps.

UPDATE: Scratch that – it didn’t work for me.  I can’t say it’s “broken”, but I’m not about to troubleshoot how to get it to work correctly.

Why and How I Jailbroke my iPhone

Or, “How I Got My iPhone to Do This”:

Overview

I finally broke down and jailbroke my iPhone.  My motivation was that June Fabrics developed PdaNet for the iPhone, but it was rejected by the App Store, so they released it on Cydia.  However, once I jailbroke, I found a wealth of apps out there that fill in most of the missing pieces.

Keep reading for the full details.

Move any file from iPhone to desktop via USB

I found a way to copy a file (from any directory) from a jailbroken iPhone to any computer using the USB sync cable.  After typing this up, I did find one other reference to this process, although it seems to have a couple of extra steps that aren’t necessary (i.e., manzana).

This is handy in a couple of situations:

1. Where you don’t have wifi (like work), so you can’t SFTP.
2. Where the file is large (e.g., downloads from MXTube)

You need MobileFinder (or MobileTerminal) installed.  You do not need iTunes installed.  See the steps after the break.

Key directories on the iPhone

Another dumping ground – this time for interesting directories in the iPhone file structure:

• Voicemail: /private/var/mobile/Library/Voicemail/ (source)
• SMS database: /private/var/mobile/Library/SMS/
  • Either back it up, or
  • Export it using sqlite
• Camera pix: /private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM
• NES ROMs: /private/var/mobile/Media/ROMs/NES
• Cycorder videos: /private/var/mobile/Media/Videos
• Call history: /private/var/mobile/Library/CallHistory
• Winterboard themes: /private/Library/Themes (link to /private/var/stash/Themes.xxxxxx)
• Ringtones: /private/Library/Ringtones (link to /private/var/stash/Ringtones.xxxxxx)

Viewing SMS from a jailbroken iPhone

1. Download sqlite.
2. SFTP into the iPhone.
3. Download sms.db into the same folder.
4. Open a command window, navigate to the directory where sqlite and sms.db are, and enter the following:

c:\sqlite sms.db
sqlite> .output messages.txt
sqlite> select * from message;
sqlite> .output stdout
sqlite> .quit

That’s it – now you can import the messages.txt file into Excel and view the messages.

Archiving Cydia installation packages on the iPhone

An interesting question was posed at PDAPhoneHome about downloading jailbroken apps on the iPhone for archival purposes.  Without getting into whether this is necessary or not, here’s how you do it:

First, install MobileTerminal, run it, and then switch to root (or install OpenSSH and SSH in as root) – you can install from either Cydia or Installer:

su root

(default password is “alpine”, without quotes)

Then, use apt to download the package:

apt-get install <packagename> -d

The files are saved to /var/cache/apt/archives

You can back this file up via SFTP, and install from it using the following commandline:

dpkg -i <package.deb>

Note that <packagename> and <package.deb> will likely be different.

Winterboard themes using Terminal

I don’t have wifi at work, so I can’t SFTP into my iPhone to update the theme.  My *nix skills are a bit rusty (has it changed since 1995?), so here’s my cheatsheet.

Of course, you must jailbreak first.  Also, make sure you have terminal and curl installed.

1. Upload the new icon file somewhere and note the URL
2. Open Terminal
3. Change to root user (“su root”)
4. Navigate to Themes directory (“cd /Library/Themes”)
5. Navigate to the folder you want to put the file into (“cd ODS.theme”)
6. Use curl to download the file and save it locally (“curl http://www.place.com/file.png -o file.png”)

That’s it!