Ste Packaging

I’ve added/updated the following software packages for the iPhone:

1. [upd] Erica’s iPhone Utils (0.06) [removed snap2album; fixed plist problems]
2. [upd] Erica’s Ported Utils (0.06) [added wget; fixed plist problems]
3. [upd] Erica’s Utilities (0.36) [added snap2album & toJPEG; fixed plist problems]
4. [upd] Search (1.02b) [see notes below]
5. [new] Bhagavad Gita As It Is (1.0) [an eBook]

Search changes:

• New license key system implemented for easier management
• Added default startup screen preference
• Improved search algorithm to match in fewer keystrokes
• Added Contact Notes to search criteria (however contact notes are not displayed yet)
• Added Job Title to search criteria
• Added Department to search criteria
• Added email addresses to contact info screen
• Added home pages to contact info screen

-ste

You need to open Installer.app, go to the Install page, then the System category, and install the “BSD Subsystem” package. It contains a library (/usr/lib/libarmfp.dylib) that is needed by the vast majority of the applications you will want to install, though they do not explicitly require you to install it. You really do need to though.

Note: this is not a problem with jailbreakme.com - it’s just a common problem I’m seeing reported by people who went there and then didn’t install the BSD Subsystem package afterwards.

Update: ‘drudge’, one of the creators of jailbreakme.com, has just added that library to the list of things that gets installed when you go to that site and jailbreak your 1.1.1 iPhone, so this shouldn’t be an issue anymore. Any other packages that need additional parts of the BSD Subsystem generally require you to install it first.

-ste

I’ve added/updated the following software packages for the iPhone:

1. [new] AJ Hall Collection (0.1) [a set of eBooks]
2. [upd] AJ Hall Collection (0.1-1) [corrected an error in the plist file]
3. [new] SMSD (0.01) [deletes individual SMS messages, instead of whole conversations]
4. [upd] Bosscube Image Set (0.4) [almost two-thirds smaller!]
5. [upd] my fiRst tHeem (1.5) [more icons]

-ste

The latest Installer.app, released today by ‘lg’ at Nullriver, is version 3.0b7. You should update to this as soon as you can. It fixes the following issues:

• incorrect handling of symbolic links in packages
• crashes when downloading very large packages
• problems when unpacking very large packages
• problems handling packages zipped up on Windows

-ste

A lot of folks were having trouble installing the “BSD Subsystem” package (v1.5) via Installer.app today, from the Nullriver repository. As a temporary measure, I put up an alternate copy of it in my repository and people started downloading it.

Some of those people installed it, because it looked like and update, even though it really wasn’t - it just installed the same thing on top of itself, for them.

And then I started getting email about how the ‘vi’ command was broken after people applied the update. So, I took down the package and started investigating. This shouldn’t have been happening, as it was literally the same zip file as they would download from the other site.

A quick ‘ls’ immediately showed the problem: the new version of Installer.app doesn’t appear to handle symbolic links in the package’s zip file and it trashes them. Fortunately, I think there are only three in that package. You can easily see if you are affected or not. First, ssh into your iPhone and run the following:

cd /usr/bin
ls -l more nano vi

If the output looks similar to this, then you are ok:

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 4 Oct 10 23:07 more -> less
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 4 Oct 10 23:07 nano -> pico
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 3 Oct 10 23:07 vi -> vim

If, however, it looks similar to this, then your symlinks are hosed:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 4 Oct 24 21:53 more
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 4 Oct 24 21:53 nano
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 3 Oct 24 21:53 vi

If that’s the case, you can easily fix it by running these commands:

rm more nano vi
ln -s less more
ln -s pico nano
ln -s vim vi

Now you should be all set.

I have reported this apparent bug to Nullriver.

UPDATE: This will also be a problem for anyone who installed the BSD Subsystem via Installer.app 3.0 , at any time.

UPDATE: This bug is fixed in Installer.app 3.0b7. Also fixed: problems downloading & unpacking large packages and  an inability to handle packages zipped up on Windows. You should update to this release as soon as you can.

-ste