Colin Harrington

Actually doing the Jailbreak is easy:

1. Download and run the jailbreak app called Absinthe
2. Read the install instructions
3. Follow the installation instructions
4. Be patient.

When you are done you’ll have the Cydia App installed.

“This is where the fun begins” – Anakin Skywalker

My shortlist of apps:

• Activator (Control over gestures)
• SBSettings + Toggles & Themes
• Custom BootLoaders: animate + animate fix (Boot Logos)
• FakeCarrier (or removal for space!)
• Firebreak (Enabling the hidden Panorama Camera feature)
• Five Icon { Dock, Folder, Switcher }
• Five Column Springboard.
• Sound/Ringtone themes.
• Winterboard Themes
• Veency (VNC)
• MXTube
• My{Wi,3G} (Paid$$)
• SSH (only if you know what you are doing)
• Mobible Terminal

SSH:

• Install OpenSSH in Cydia
• Change your default password.
• use public-key/private keys
• Mount and browse your device over SSH

Mobile Terminal:

The one in the Cydia store is *old* and won’t work on iOS4 or iOS5.  I’m not sure why, but it seems like the contributor abandoned this package.

You can install it by other means.
http://code.google.com/p/mobileterminal/wiki/Installation

• Adding another repository and installing via Cydia
• Manually installing it (files + Permissions on the device)
• Open the deb with iFile (Paid$$ but with a free trial)
• Cydia auto-installed deb using Cydia’s auto-install feature
• dropping the .deb in the /var/root/Media/Cydia/AutoInstall folder (create it if its not there, case-sensitive)
• http://www.thedailybuggle.com/autoinstall-deb-file-package-cydia-terminal-command-line/

Animated BootLogos:

Back in the early days you could use an app called LogoMe to update a custom boot logo. Then came animate which let you animate your boot logo (Like the Windows 98+ startup logo screens) You’ll need the animate fix to get them to work now.

I ended up making my own Boot Animation of my AppleTux logo with the help of a couple blogposts

The process is simple: basically create a series of PNGs {0.png, 1.png, 2.png, ... n.png} and place them in a named folder inside of /Library/BootLogos/

/Library/BootLogos/AppleTux/ looks like this:

And can be downloaded here:

Public/Private Key Cryptography isn’t exactly new stuff in the world of Computing. It makes our world go round. It is the basis for secure communication in today’s world. HTTPS, SSL, TLS, SSH are all cryptographic protocols that use Public/Private key infrastructures. Without these protocols, we would think twice about using credit card, banking or any other sensitive information on the Internet.

We all know that passwords aren’t very secure. If you choose a password that is easy to remember then its easier to guess via brute force. If you choose a password that is random or hard to remember then you are more likely to write it down. Any well-versed digital community member already has many username/password credentials to remember so we are less likely to remember extremely difficult random passwords. This is the password paradox, which leads me to look into managing access via public/private key pairs instead.

Generate a public/private key pair (if you don’t have one already)

Github has an excellent tutorial with good illustrations on how to generate ssh keys with ssh-keygen, but here is an overview:

• *Backup your existing keys* — if they exists so that you don’t overwrite them.
• generate a new key with ssh-keygen

Definitely setup a passphrase! – Its like a password for your private key. The passphrase is a second line of defence if anyone were to acquire your private key.

The .pub is your public key, you can safely share this anywhere, whereas the private key is entirely private! DO NOT show anyone, don’t copy it anywhere and only securely back it up.. This is your new password and large liability if it fell into the wrong hands.

Example:
Some folks like to generate and manage keypairs for each location, or at least manage certain levels of keys, but I’m not going to dive into that topic.

Configure the Server (if needed)

Make sure that the server has Public key authentication enabled (most do). for OpenSSH it would be the following in the sshd_config:

RSAAuthentication yes
PubkeyAuthentication yes
AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys

Then all you have to do is:

• Put your public key (the one ending in .pub) as a line in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file (create it if it doesn’t exist)
• Restart your SSH server
• Log in without being prompted for a password

This is really handy for managing servers especially on Amazon’s EC2, local access between machines, SFTP, SSH tunneling, or even getting access to a jailbroken iPhone or any other device with OpenSSH installed on it.

The guys over at debian-administrator.org wrote a good guide to Password-less logins with OpenSSH that is worth looking into if you have issues or want to dive deeper.