iPhone Passion

The second thing you do after jailbreaking the iPhone and importing the SIM contacts is, without a single doubt, installing one of the hundreds cool iPhone apps available on various Installer sources. In most cases, you’ll get away with only this. However, occasionally, some of the coolest apps will require a bit of advanced iPhone usage, and that’s what we’re gonna cover here.

You might have already heard some rumors about this, anyways here it is: the iPhone is a real computer, running a tiny stripped down version of Mac OSX, similar in many ways to what you have on your MacBook. In order to unleash its full potential, we’ll have to “unstrip” it a little bit by installing some of the tools found on Unix .

BSD Subsystem can be found in the “System” menu of Installer.app, and will install some essential utilities that you’ll further need. Plus, many iPhone apps need it in order to work. Installing it is as easy as installing any of the Installer.app packages(that is, 4 clicks away). If you like screenshots, take a look at iClarified over here. I’m pretty sure that you’ll need to restart the iPhone after you have installed this.

To reboot the iPhone, after you exit Installer.app, keep the button on top pressed for about 5 seconds, until it shows you a “Slide to Power Off” question. Slide, to power it off, then press the same button again to restart the iPhone.

Second on our list is the OpenSSH server. It needs BSD Subsystem, and it gives you console Terminal access to the iPhone from your computer. Yes, you heard me well - once you got OpenSSH installed(also found in Installer’s “System” menu), you’ll be able to access the iPhone in a Unix console, as if it were an ordinary computer.

But first, I think you’ll need to restart the iPhone again(just like 2 paragraphs above).

So.. you rebooted the iPhone once again. We can give it a try now. First, make sure the iPhone and the computer are in the same wireless network. Next, on the iPhone, go into Settings app, the Wi-Fi menu, click on the arrow right to the active wireless connection, and you should be presented to a details page. What we’re interested in is the IP Address.

If you’re on a Mac, you open up Terminal; type ssh followed by the iPhone’s IP address and -l root, such as:

ssh 192.168.1.100 -l root (it’s just a sample address).
If the connection can be made, and if the iPhone has BSD Subsystem and OpenSSH installed and ready, then you’ll be asked for a password - the one that should work is alpine - if it doesn’t, you’re on your own, keep on googling for “iPhone ssh root password”.

If on Windows, you can access ssh using the great free utility putty. Similar with above, you enter the iPhone’s IP address, “root” as the username and “alpine” as the password.

Well.. that’s about it. If it works, congrats! The world of iPhone hacking is wide open for you.

Using SSH and BDS Subsystem, we’ll soon teach you how to install Wikipedia on the iPhone, how to hack Tap Tap Revolution to make it work, or how to fix your iPhone Mail after it stopped working following an iPhone restore.