Jailbreaking a UK iPhone
This was compiled from the conceited software write up and also iphoneatlas’ write up (I had a nervy 15 minutes of nothing whilst it was stuck in restore mode - cue much Googling!!).
I thought i’d write this up as I couldn’t find anything specific to say that the o2 iPhone could / has been broken. So here is my quick guide. The jailbreak operation took about two hours, including downloading both 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 firmwares and the aforementioned 15 minutes of shakiness - mostly due to having to Google a lot, just for my own sanity! Fixing the Edge and VVM settings was another 30 minutes.
Usual disclaimers apply, if you brick it that’s your too bad. On with the show.
1. Download the 1.1.2 jailbreak (112JB) kit from concieted software.
2. Download the 1.1.1 firmware from appldnld.apple.com… (official Apple download site, direct link).
3. Connect iPhone to Mac, hold down Power and Home buttons until iTunes pops up with this prompt.
4. Press the ‘alt’ key (apparently AKA Option key) and hit restore, this should open up a dialogue for you to choose the 1.1.1 firmware you downloaded from Apple. Once that finishes you’ll get a 1015 error prompt from iTunes and another Recovery Mode prompt. Ignore that.
5. Run Jailbreak.jar from the kit and use Boot from Recovery. I sat about for 15, sphincter clinching, minutes. The progress bar didn’t complete and the phone wouldn’t reboot. I thought i’d bricked it. The solution was to close iTunes (it took a while to close) and THEN run Jailbreak.jar. Without iTunes it literally took a couple of seconds before it rebooted. You can quit the Jailbreak.jar instance now.
6. Open Safari on the iPhone, join a Wireless network and browse to www.jailbreakme.com and choose “Install AppSnapp” at the bottom of the page. This adds the Installer.app icon to the iPhone home. Open it up.
7. At the bottom of Installer there are 5 icons, choose Install / Tweaks 1.1.1 / Oktoprep and then hit Install.
8. You’ll now see a Notice “You are now ready to perform the “Update” to 1.1.2 and continue with the TouchFree process.”. Open iTunes.
9. Selecting iPhone in the menu, you can hit Continue to restore your settings and wait for the iPhone to reboot.
10. Now iTunes will display the usual iPhone screen (see below) and start to sync up your content. I stopped it as I have a lot of shit to sync and it’s 01:15. Hit the Update button to start downloading the 1.1.2 firmware. It’s 160MB..
11. Once the iPhone reboots again, iTunes will start to update to 1.1.2. Apparently if you have hit Restore instead of Update you will have to start from the very beginning again.
12. Now, once the 1.1.2 update has installed and the iPhone is rebooted again, activation will succeed and you’ll see the shiny “Activation has completed” notice on your iPhone. You’ll notice that Installer.app is no longer on your home page.
At this point, i’ve had my contacts, notes, recent calls and text messages restored. Brilliant! Although visual voicemail doesn’t appear to work.
13. Run Jailbreak.jar again, this time selecting ‘install ssh’ and setting a decent r00t password. (I wonder how many people left it set as Alpine?!) The Jailbreak app is a lot more verbose this time around, Installing the ssh components, Reading flash image and finally Writing flash image. I felt a lot more secure in it this time..
14. The first time it reboots (again) I got the same alert from iTunes about recovery mode (as above) and it just hung again, as before. Closing iTunes, quiting Jailbreak, restart Jailbreak and choose “Boot from recovery” sorted that. 2 more automatic reboots and my iPhone is up, with installer and ssh installed on the home page.
Inbound and outbound calls work, as do texts. Still no Visual Voicemail though, nor Edge. A 15 minute stint on Google, trying different Edge username/password credentials (none of them work) and I stumbled on the following. (I’ve lost the link now, will try and dig it out tomorrow)
I installed BSD Subsystem from the Installer.app and ssh’d in using the root credentials set in Jailbreak.
Moving the following files around sorted the problem.
<Start>
rm /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.carrier.plist
ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreTelephony.framework/Support/O2_UK.plist /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.carrier.plist
rm -f /var/root/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist
<end>
One final reboot and Edge was back along with Visual Voicemail.
As a final note, I’ve also downloaded the 1.1.2 firmware from the Apple download site (Direct Link), i’m going to give my iPhone a restore tomorrow to make sure it goes back to the ‘official’ version. Just in case.
So, that’s it. A Jailbroken 1.1.2 UK 02 iPhone. Hopefully I’ve got some good keywords in here for search engines to index. As I mentioned earlier, information for UK specific jailbreaking is pretty thin on the ground.
Technorati Tags: iPhone, Jailbreak, 02, UK, Apple, Edge, Visual Voicemail
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Help stuck on step 5
5. Run Jailbreak.jar from the kit and use Boot from Recovery. I sat about for 15, sphincter clinching, minutes. The progress bar didn’t complete and the phone wouldn’t reboot. I thought i’d bricked it. The solution was to close iTunes (it took a while to close) and THEN run Jailbreak.jar. Without iTunes it literally took a couple of seconds before it rebooted. You can quit the Jailbreak.jar instance now.
it dont reboot the progress bar stops and i have tryed to shut down itunes it dont work still
Try rebooting the iPhone, reconnect and rerun the jar.
Make sure you haven’t got multiple versions of the jailbreak,jar package.
Great article, I do have one question though. How did restoring your phone go? Did it set it back to the “default”?
And do you loose your text messages / voice mails when you do either?
The restore seemed to work fine, I did it through recovery mode.
Text messages are preserved and restored from the backup, VVMs are held online, not on the phone so you do not lose them either.
Well that worked pretty well! I used iNdependence to install ssh rather than Jailbreak.jar since that didn’t seem to want to install it, but everything else worked just fine. Now there just needs to be some decent apps on there other than MobileScrobbler.
I’ve seen a few posts around saying that the .jar wouldn’t run properly from the desktop but worked OK when invoked at the terminal - very strange.
MobScrob is the only app i’ve had on there for any length of time, a lot of the stuff under installer is pretty much just fluff - check out the Pirates thing FFS!!
I keep meaning to try and work out the MMS settings as there are a couple of apps for that (developed in the US so they might not work).
The vt1000 Terminal is pretty useful, i’ve used SSH to my webserver a few times and Tap Tap Revolution is pretty good fun - even if it seems to have a MASSIVE memory leak (as does a lot of the stuff, Summerboard included).