Firmware 1.1.3 woes. A developers nightmare.

Zodttd posted this news:

The Firmware 1.1.3 jailbreak was made public. But not once, instead three different people released three different versions along with different updates to those versions! Whew, a lot has been going on. The issue to developers of iPhone and iPod Touch software is the difference in which user runs the applications we program. In previous firmwares earlier than 1.1.3, we used user ‘root’. And hence we had /var/root/Media and /var/root/Library to store our files and settings in, respectively. Things have changed in 1.1.3:

- Nate True released a version of 1.1.3 that uses the legacy root user for control of running applications. This is great for compatibility, but the firmware had other issues.

- NerveGas released an official dev team release that uses user ‘mobile’ for running applications. But this release had a corrupted installer.

Finally planetbeing made a proper release with following updates, which uses the proper ‘mobile’ user. But there’s some problems I found…

The problem with using the mobile user, is the user of an application has to be aware of the ownership and permissions of directories much more than before.

For instance, gpSPhone v1.5.0 being released today, uses /var/mobile/ if available. But in planetbeing’s release the /var/mobile/Library and /var/mobile/Media directories are often owned by user root.

If root owns either of these directories, settings and savestates can’t be saved since user mobile won’t have write permissions in the “Other group”. So this is all very confusing to some, but there’s a simple fix. Run SSH, login as root, and use the following command to set ownership of this directory recursively:

chown -hR mobile /var/mobile

This command will then fix many issues found when installing applications under 1.1.3 when using the /var/mobile/[…] directory. It only fixes the ownership of the /var/mobile directories that get created as being owned by root. Make sure when creating directories after running this command, such as /var/mobile/Media/ROMs, that you chown this directory to being owned by mobile such as using the command above again. This of course is only required if the directory being created is owned by root.

So I’m working on getting my software working under all three firmware releases, all of which have different issues. What a mess huh?

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