Erica Utilities and Utilities for iPhone
Erica Sadun | 3:34 pm | October 28, 2007 | Update, Utilities, Software, iPod touch, iPhone
At the prodding of the always-vigilant and much better organized Shaun Erickson, I have put together archives for both the Erica Utilities and iPhone Utilities. They’ll be available shortly through Installer.app. Both packages require you to use the command-line. Thank you Shaun for remembering!
These utility packages include all kinds of command-line related tools, including playing audio, restarting your SpringBoard, throwing up alerts, and so forth. The Phone utilities are meant to be used only on the iPhone. You won’t do well, for example, trying to record audio on the touch.
The Utilities will be getting installed this go-’round into ~/bin. (They used to go into /usr/local/bin, a location I much prefer.) This is because the touch has so much less space on the OS partition than the iPhone. Installing–regardless of touch or phone–onto the media partition helps preserve that very limited space.
Make sure to add /var/root/bin into your path, using whatever shell you pick as your default. Since the TIFF-exploit-jailbreaks remove the Media ‘noexec’ tag from /etc/fstab, so you’ll be able to happily run whatever you like from your root folder.
19 Comments »
Comment by derekbar90 | October 28, 2007 | 8:40 pm
how do you go about adding var/root/bin to your path i dknt believe i understand fully please any help would be greatly appriciated
Comment by Erica Sadun | October 28, 2007 | 9:50 pm
You need to use the UNIX path commands specific to your shell. I use csh, so I do something along the lines of % set path = (/bin /usr/local/bin /var/root/bin)
Comment by elsaul | October 28, 2007 | 11:21 pm
For those of us who updated with the symlink hack (which of course doesn’t include the iTouchers) /etc/fstab still has noexec on the /private/var partition! So when Installer.app installs your utilities and has the helpful reminder to add /var/root/bin to your path, you might want to also remind people to check that this flag isn’t set. And thanks for units! It’s the most useful unix program of all time.
Comment by billgrove | October 28, 2007 | 11:51 pm
I’m really new to this as well. I ran the automated jailbreak, and have it running fine, and am trying to ssh into my iphone using root and dottie, but it’s saying it’s not the right password. I did install the BSD subsystem as I was trying to get this to work, as well as your utilities. I’m not sure if that changed the default password or not. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Once I’m in, I can change the path, I just can’t get in!
Bill
Comment by tcaviezel | October 29, 2007 | 12:36 am
Very new to this stuff as well. What do i add var/root/bin too? Is there a site you know of that gives new people a chance to learn this?
Comment by Erica Sadun | October 29, 2007 | 7:02 am
New password is called “dottie”.
As for the path thing, google for setting your path in unix
Comment by Erica Sadun | October 29, 2007 | 7:02 am
D’oh!
New password is alpine
Not dottie
alpine
Comment by billgrove | October 29, 2007 | 9:09 am
Thank you! That worked MUCH better! It’s been many years since I used Linux on a daily basis… now to just try and remember all those commands… Greps and tails and cats, OH MY!
Bill
Comment by tcaviezel | October 29, 2007 | 9:15 am
ty for the response. I was able to get the path set however im still lost. Looks like ill just wait for the installer to come out.
Comment by Erica Sadun | October 29, 2007 | 9:18 am
Unfortunately, the Erica Utilities are never going to offer interactive user interfaces because they’re a command-line package. If there’s something specific you need to use, you may want to hunt down a GUI application alternative.
Comment by billgrove | October 29, 2007 | 9:32 am
Is there a way to set the iphone as a USB data drive? I see there is a utility out there in the world for the Mac, but it still requires software on the computer. I would like to use the iphone, even if it’s just a partition or folder on the drive, as an external drive to carry around my utilities. If there isn’t one, you have your next project!
Bill
Comment by Erica Sadun | October 29, 2007 | 9:33 am
Sorry! No way I know of yet for USB data drive support.
Comment by derekbar90 | October 29, 2007 | 11:04 am
I also have found that you can open them in the finder.app just by setting it to run executables
Comment by travisrichardson | October 29, 2007 | 11:55 am
does this include the calendar add button for the Touch? if not where can i get that?
Comment by mikek | October 29, 2007 | 9:25 pm
Hi Erica,
Thank you for all the great work you’ve done. I have a question with the playaudio utility. Does it play .wav files? I get Vonange voice mails emailed to me, but the default quicktime(?) player can’t handle them. I was hoping to some how save -> play/convert them. First problem is I can’t even figure out how to save them from Safari. Could I change the default .wav player from quicktime to a script?
Thanks again,
Mike
Comment by Erica Sadun | October 29, 2007 | 9:27 pm
Yes, I have played wav with playaudio.
– Erica
Comment by leo | October 30, 2007 | 2:34 am
I cannot find the file I need to edit to make this a permanent addition to path, I’ve spent a bit of time googling and can’t figure out how to add that path /var/root/bin
Comment by Erica Sadun | October 30, 2007 | 8:14 am
The file varies by shell. For example, .cshrc for csh and .profile for bash
Comment by jfbouzereau | November 1, 2007 | 3:18 pm
Hello,
I’ am trying to port “timidity”, an open source midi player, to iphone/ipod-touch. So far, I have successfully compiled and linked the application, but when It runs, the AudioDeviceStart
function gives error kAudioDevicePermissionsError.
As you have written the “playaudio” utility, I guess you are
familiar with the CoreAudio API. Is there something
special to be done on the Iphone platform to have this working ?
Thanks in advance for any help!
Comments RSS.
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.