Absinthe and White Icons

Well this weekend turned out pretty good for the Community. The long awaited untethered jailbreak tool for the A5 chip devices was released Friday by @pod2g ‘s “Dream Team” which included @planetbeing and Cydia founder @saurik along with others entitled Absinthe.

Initially released for Mac only, Absinthe is a one click tool that much like Greenpois0n does most the work you.
See YouTube for a 1000 tutorial videos on yet another easy jailbreak.
Although it takes a bit longer than recent jailbreaks, five minutes is worth the wait, although I’m sure some of you will bitch about it as most Windows users.
Windows users had to wait just a bit longer before we saw Cydia on our devices. And complaints were flooding my twitter feed annoying the shit out of me every fifteen minutes. It’s amazing how people still cry about getting a free service that the dev-team works their ass to give and has continued to make 100% FREE, but they do.
FAST FORWARD, less than 24 hours and we had out jailbreak, same as Macs. Experienced users had one easier this morning, but it was a CDI (if you don’t know what that is, chances are you would have messed up your device.)
Shortly after the release tutorial videos on the Windows CDI tool were released however. most were encouraged to remain patient and wait a few more hours for the “One Click” for Windows.
…and just as we all told people, a few hours later, the Dream Team released the final tool we all needed and here now at 2:15am roughly 12 hours later I would say most of are still tinkering and getting our devices back the way we remember.
It feels great to hold a jailbroken 4S in my hand, and I hope your holding one too, but here are couple things to know about Absinthe and getting back to Cydia.

One issue I’ve been seeing people ask about is the the “White Icons” issue. This is due to a glitch during the icons image-cache rebuild and can be fixed by a simple respring. Anytime you install a theme or a mobile substrate tweak you may experience this issue. Just respring either via SBSettings or Respring (app like tweak in Cydia.)
If you continue to have this issue Open SBSettings>System Options > Fix User Dims.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

If you’ve never experienced Safe Mode the first thing to remember is DON’T PANIC! This is actually a good thing. Most likely you have just installed a package that is not compatible with your devices FW. Often times with a new jailbreak the dev hasn’t updated to run on the new FW, so when you try to run a package designed for 4.0 on 5.0 it can cause problems, by sending your phone into SafeMode it keeps it from seriously damaging it or even worse “bricking” it. Restart, open Cydia and remove last installed package.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

One more tip. If you’re not sure about a package, don’t install it, ask around first, you can easily find compatibility list so you don’t have to take the time and risk yourself. Also follow your devs on twitter, keep up with them, they usually will keep you updated on news. Most of them offer fantastic support through email and some on twitter.
Of course jailbreaking isn’t all about tweaks and apps that Apple didn’t want in the AppStore so they can add it as a feature in the next iOS.
It’s about themes and customizing the look of your device.
So check out your themers too and by all means
PLEASE SUPPORT YOUR THEMERS and DEVS.

limera1n

A day before the scheduled release of the long awaited greenpoison from the @chronicdevteam , George Hotz, a.k.a. GeoHot as he is known in the Jailbreak Community decided to release his jailbreak named limera1n . You may remember hearing the name come up many months back, but you may also remember GeoHot saying he was done with jailbreaks. This has caused quite a little heated controversy and pissed the devteam off. Now, I know some of you don’t really care about the behind the scenes of it all and the “who got what from whom,” or “who helped who do this,” so I will not cover that in this blog. Maybe, if enough people comment and ask I’ll do some research and write a blog about that, but I’ll most likely just link you to a source that has the story, rather than just reiterating what I have read. I don’t want this to turn into a political blog, this is a review.

Let’s get to it.

limera1n is said to jailbreak ALL devices running 4.0-4.1 +++ (and beyond) and also states on the site that it is unpatchable.

As with blackra1n – limera1n is a one click jailbreak and is an untethered jailbreak, which is the best news for anyone who has had to deal with a tethered jailbreak in the past. It’s almost just better just to stay on a lower FW and not worry about jailbreaking your device every time your device is tunred off or battery dies, than deal with a tethered jailbreak.

I will say I was somewhat reluctant at first to use this jailbreak. Not because of any profound loyalty to the devteam. Although, I do love, admire, respect, and appreciate everything those guys do. They put a ton of time into giving us the jailbreaks each and every (significant) FW release and for that I applaud them. Did I mention they do it for FREE, but I’m getting on my soapbox and off topic. My hesitation was because all the tweets saying it was buggy, but bugs are expected in Beta and geohot even asked pardon on the site for his “ragged edges.” It was an early release when it went live today and in Beta, but who doesn’t like to test beta? Not me usually. I prefer to grab and go.

However, a few short hours later, there I sat in front of my laptop with the lime green raindrop on my desktop. I debated over which devices I would allow to get wet from all this lime green rain I had been hearing about all day, and really for the past couple days, however, we were told limera1n would be released the day after greenpois0n which that in itself caused enough of a shit storm. limera1n now being released the day before, —smoke out ears of devteam and company—

The jailbreak was very similar to blackra1n, with one more advanced step that blackra1n did not require. You will have to put your phone in DFU mode, which I actually prefer. It may sound crazy but it makes me feel I some control over the hack if I’m prompting the device in any way other than clicking a button. Yeah, the one clicks are great and JailbreakMe.com was ridiculous! But tools like resn0w and sn0wbreeze are really NOT that difficult and learning about DFU and Recovery mode is very important if you want to be able to jailbreak your device and know how to get out of any problems that you may encounter.

“make it rain…”

I ran into an issue right away during the jailbreak. This was a “me” issue and not a “limera1n” issue. During your jailbreak process, iTunes will open- IGNORE- this, although, it may be habit to close it right away, with this jb, it doesn’t matter. After, that failed attempt, I was successful and my device rebooted as expected. Scroll over a couple pages and there it was, the limera1n icon,

Just like I did with blackra1n, I clicked on the icon, and just like with blackra1n, I checked and Installed Cydia, but unlike blackra1n, there is of course no option for Icy or Rock. Device reboot. The Cydia icon appeared right where it should have, in the first open space on my SpringBoard. Well… sorta.

Cydia was there, but the icon was not. It was just a solid white/silver icon. With a gradient look to it (if your familiar with PS.) The limera1n icon had also turned into one of these strange looking icons. I’ve seen these before when a buggy tweak or Cydia app was installed, so it didn’t worry me too much. I opened Cydia and without no delay or problems it gave that “Reorganizing…” message and it did take several minutes, but patience paid off and after my I perfomred my Complete Upgrade in Cydia, I rebooted and I was in business. However, I still had the icon issue. I powered off and powered on, but this did not fix the problem. I reopened Cydia and even tried to install a package to see if there was an issue with using Cyida causing the icon not to appear, because I could live with an icon not showing up. Open Cydia –NO ISSUES.

I searched for a theme to install and Invisble Folders worked fine.

So, I thought a nice hard reset would fix the problem. So, I held the Home and Power buttons down until the phone cut itself off – continuing to hold those buttons down until the device powered back on, I released the buttons. BAM! Cydia icons were on the SpringBoard.

4.1 “]

So despite all the bullshit that GeoHot may have caused by releasing limera1n and regardless if this sets back the next exploit/jailbreak it works and it uses a different exploit than greenpois0n (to my understanding) which was only going to jailbreak A4 devices anyway, so this at least takes care of those users who do not have those devices. Sn0wbreeze helped a few uses out, who for some reason still have a 3G, and I really think SHATter will still happen without any roadblocks. Although, if I really knew what I was talking about when it came to the technical parts of the jailbreak/exploits I’d be trying to find them myself, but I don’t. So, I just use whatever tool is out there for my perspective device and hope there will be another one with the new device and FW.

Am I happy with limera1n? YES!

Will I use limera1n on other devices? YES!

Do I recommend it? This is actually not a simple yes or no, I am waiting to see what the devtea is going to do with greenpois0n tomorrow, before I use it on my i4, but having said that, I would recommend it for all devices other than i4 and ipt4g.

AFTER limera1n

Invisble Folder Tweak