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Semitethered Jailbreak Beta testing for ios 5

Gregoris

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What is Semitethered Jailbreaking you may ask?..

Taken from here: Semitethered Jailbreak | iPhone News, Apps, BigBoss, Guides & Jailbreaking

My(bigBosses) iOS5 semitethered jailbreak package is ready for beta testing.What is semitethered jailbreak and why do you care? In short, it is protection for if your device reboots while you’re on the road. Read on.

As you may know, iOS5 currently has a tethered jailbreak. This means that after you have jailbroken and installed most stuff you care about, you go to reboot your device, and it will no longer boot. You will be either stuck at apple logo forever, or you will get to itunes restore screen. When this happens, you have to hook up to your computer and use redsn0w “just boot” feature which gets you rebooted successfully again. It’s not all bad, as iOS5 is pretty stable. But if your device crashes and reboots while you’re out on the road, you are screwed and without a phone until you get home.

An untethered jailbreak is one that does not have such problems. Here you can reboot and the device reboots successfully. Because we are using the limera1n exploit discovered from Geohot last year, we are always guaranteed a tethered jailbreak on last generation devices. A new exploit will need to be found to untether us.

To get us through this period, I have worked on a semi-tethered solution. The semi-tethered jailbreak will allow you to reboot on the road, but with limited functionality. It is enough that you are no longer stranded, and you can use your phone, text, and many other features. This is just until you get home and can use redsn0w again to “just boot tethered”. Once you do that, you’re back to fully functional state.

Here is a summary of what you can and cannot do when in semi-tethered reboot state. Remember, this is only when your device crashed and rebooted on the road and before you got back to your computer to “just boot”. It is better than being stuck in apple logo:

1) Can use phone, sms (text messages)
2) Can use every other stock app on iphone.
3) Cannot use mobile safari
4) Can use other appstore web browsers such as atomic web browser
5) Cannot use mail app. You could install a gmail app from appstore or such instead.
6) You cannot use any jailbreak tweak, app, cydia until you boot tethered.
7) While in the semitether booted state, you should not add a jailbreak ios5 notification such as sbsettings to notifications during this

state or your device will be stuck in a respring loop until you get home to “boot tethered”.
Those are all the limitations I have found so far. There may be some others. I may provide a more technical write up on why these limitations exist, but for now it doesn’t really matter. They just do.
Now, there are some other caveats to installing this package:

1) The device will take longer to boot up. When you reboot, it has to reload every service. It will respring a couple times also.
2) According to Saurik, there are some “problems” to reloading all daemons on the fly. This is why mobile substrate installation requires “reboot device” in cydia. I have not experienced any of these problems, but I am not promising they do not exist. This is why we will need testing to see which problems may occur.

I believe the good outweigh the bad here. Once the untethered jailbreak is out, you will not need or want to install this semitether package. In future iOS versions when we are back to having only a tethered jailbreak, you should be able to install this again to semitether your jailbreak.

As far as support for this package, please send me email preferably from Cydia so the proper semitether subject is used. If you want to email me from a computer, and want a response, use this subject: “Cydia/APT(A): semitether”. Remember, this is still in beta stages and may not be perfect. Do not install this if you are not prepared for that.

As for current testing, I have only tested this on an iphone 4 GSM running iOS5. As further testing shows success, I will update this page. Further, when this package seems stable enough, I may move it into the main bigboss source.

To install this, add the following repository to cydia: Semitethered Jailbreak | iPhone News, Apps, BigBoss, Guides & Jailbreaking. Note: after install, you will have to reboot your device, so make sure you are prepared at a computer to reboot tethered with redsn0w or just “home button out” of cydia and manually respring until you get home.

To test the success of this, simply reboot your device. If it boots up, it worked. Make sure you are near your computer so you can tether boot it after to get your jailbreak functionality back.
 
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Great idea there i must say........thanks for the info sir
 
Thanks for the work on this...Im going to give it a try to see if I can Reboot. How long should it take?
 
Did anybody try this , can you please post your commensta , thnx
 
i installed it yesterday and had issues with my device rebooting every other minute or so so i had to remove it.

Then i saw the post today about the update that fixes a few issues so i reinstalled it and it seems to be working like a champ. Granted its only been a few hours but so far so good.
 
I could never get the phone to reboot into semitethered state and had to use redsn0w to boot. I tried the update in Cydia but it said it was not compatible with other things on my phone and didnt work.
 
I could never get the phone to reboot into semitethered state and had to use redsn0w to boot. I tried the update in Cydia but it said it was not compatible with other things on my phone and didnt work.


Do you have ***Removed for piracy*** installed? thats the only thing i heard that will stop SemiTether from working.
 
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For info, have been using it all afternoon on iPhone4. Works like a charm.
Does not work on iPad1 through (for reference). iPad gets stuck in a reboot loop.
 
Do you have ***Removed for piracy*** installed? thats the only thing i heard that will stop SemiTether from working.

yes ***Removed for piracy*** installed. just put an update for ios 5 in cydia so i will try it again with the update.
 
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Anymore feedbacks on the semitether JB? I been thinking about trying it but I still not sure. I'm in a stock iPhone 4 with iOS 5 right now.
 
iFrog said:
Anymore feedbacks on the semitether JB? I been thinking about trying it but I still not sure. I'm in a stock iPhone 4 with iOS 5 right now.

From what I've read on here and other sites, it seems to be pretty stable after it was updated. I'm gonna give it a shot in the next couple of days. :)!
 
I may try it soon... Maybe tomorrow I can make some time and give it a shoot
 
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