Jail Breaking

Posted Tue Dec 29, 2009 in Computing

One of the things done to my iPhone is that I jailbroke it. There was a couple of reasons why I decided to jailbreak my iPhone. One is that I wanted access to a program called “backgrounder” to enable a couple of applications to run in the background on my iPhone. I sometimes like to stream Last.fm and want to be able to do that while having another application in the foreground. There’s no reason why that can’t be done (within reason — there’s only 150MB or RAM in the device), so I want to be able to do it.

The big winner for me though is the SBSettings program. This program allows a pop-up over the main display to control the radios in the iPhone. I turn off the Bluetooth, WiFi, and 3G radios when I’m not using them. It takes about two seconds to do that. I also clear the RAM on the iPhone when it starts to get kinda-full (technical term). This keeps things running smoothly (probably isn’t necessary, but I do it anyway).

The main program that I use to install these tools (and only a couple of others) is Cydia (note this is a mobile-enabled site) When I applied the jailbreak to my iPhone, I installed Cydia. However, yesterday Cydia wouldn’t load — it crashed on start-up. My suspicion was that there was a cache issue. But, I didn’t have access to the cache, or at least didn’t know where it lives in the iPhone’s filesystem.

This morning, I found a post that has the directory where Cydia houses it’s cache. I used ssh to jump into the iPhone’s filesystem, deleted the cache files, and restarted the program. Ding!

N.B. A few minutes ago (1215) I read this entry and had to laugh at the “only 150MB of RAM.” I remember when my computer had only 640KB (yep, kbytes) of RAM and I thought that was a lot. Times change…