How to Jailbreak iPhone 4S and iPad 2 on Linux

The following tutorial will teach all Linux users how to jailbreak their Apple iPhone 4S and Apple iPad 2 devices. 

As you all know, the Chronic Dev Team finally released the highly anticipated version of Absinthe jailbreak tool for the Linux platform. With Absinthe users can easily untether jailbreak iPhone 4S and iPad 2 devices powered by the Apple A5 chip.

With today's tutorial we will teach you, step by step, how to jailbreak an iPhone 4S or iPad 2 device on Linux.

Requirements:

• iPhone 4S with firmware 5.0/5.0.1
• iPad 2 with firmware 5.0/5.0.1
• libimobiledevice:
• tar.gz (1.0.6 Stable) [sources] [409 KB]
• Ubuntu (Repository) [ubuntu_deb] [0 KB]
• Red Hat/Fedora/Mandriva/openSUSE RPM noarch [rh_rpm] [0 KB]
• tar.gz (1.1.0 Development)
• Absinthe

ATTENTION: Make sure you backup your device before jailbreak! Read everything carefully, twice! We are not responsible or liable for any loss or damage of any kind of your iDevice.

Step 1 - Download and Install libimobiledevice

If you are on Ubuntu 10.10 or Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, hit the CTRL+ALT+T key combination on your keyboard and paste the following command in the terminal window:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmcenery/ppa

Input your password and hit Enter when asked. Next, paste the following command to install the libimobiledevice required library.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libimobiledevice

Other Ubuntu users can download the libimobiledevice 1.0.6 source archive required library from its official homepage. Place the archive on your home folder and extract it. Open a terminal window and type the following commands:

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential automake autoconf gettext libusbmuxd-dev libglib2.0-dev libgnutls-dev libplist-dev libplist++-dev python-dev

cd ~/libimobiledevice-1.0.6

./configure prefix=/usr

make

sudo make install

ATTENTION: When the installation is over, reboot your computer! After the restart, your Apple devices should be recognized by your Linux distribution.

Editor's note: Mandriva, Fedora, Debian and openSUSE users can find installation instruction on libimobiledevice's official website.

Step 2 - Download and run Absinthe

You can grab a copy of Absinthe jailbreak tool right now from here.

It's a tar.gz archive so just extract it on your home folder. Enter the directory and run the x86 or x86_64 (depending on your architecture) executable by double-clicking it.

Step 3 - Connect your iPhone 4S or iPad 2

ATTENTION: Make sure that your iPhone 4S or iPad 2 device has iOS 5.0 or iOS 5.0.1, the battery is charged over 50% and that it is connected to the computer via the USB cable! Not meeting these requirements will result in a failure!

Once connected, Absinthe will immediately detect your device...

Step 4 - Jailbreak your iPhone 4S or iPad 2 device

All you have to do now is to click the "Jailbreak" button and wait for the Absinthe tool to do its job. You can also watch the jailbreak progress on your device. DO NOT PUSH ANY BUTTONS!

When the progress bar on the Absinthe tool is complete, and the Absinthe icon appears on your device, launch it to complete the jailbreak process.

When Absinthe finished the jailbreak process, reboot the device and you'll see the Cydia icon on your iDevice's home screen, which means that the jailbreak process is over. See the video above for more details!

If you encounter any issues with the tutorial, do not hesitate to use our commenting system below.

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Xiaomi MIUI ROM and Apps Going Open Source

Chinese company Xiaomi decided to go open source with its highly-acclaimed MIUI ROM and other Android apps. There are no details on the reasons behind the company's decision, but in the end this will benefit Android users.

The company's ROM and other applications are being made available for the general public starting today via GitHub. Coincidence or not, this is the same git repository used by the CyanogenMod team.

Although not all Xiaomi apps are now available for download for the masses, the Chinese company promised full access to all its software in the near future.

Those unfamiliar  with Xiaomi and their MIUI ROM should know that this is one of the few custom ROMs that can really turn and Android smartphone into a unique device.

Currently, Xiaomi released source for the Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread of its customized ROM, but also confirmed it will release an Ice Cream Sandwich, which is now in development.

Xiaomi's move will allow developers to cook different MIUI ROMs or even “borrow” parts of the original MIUI and implement it their own customized ROMs.

While there's no telling what exactly it will happen with the Chinese company, Xiaomi promised to pass on any query received from other Android users.

“Currently we have a very close working relationship with the developers / test engineers and product managers at Xiaomi. Your queries are being passed on so please continue to give us your comments.”

Hopefully, part of the team that made the MIUI project possible will continue to work and develop new apps and customized ROMs for the Android community.

Android users and developers who would like to download the latest MIUI ROM and apps released by Xiaomi can head over to GitHub and check the run down the items that have been made open source.

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Windows Phone 8 to Appeal More to PC Vendors

Later this year, Microsoft is expected to bring to the market the next version of its mobile operating system, namely Windows Phone 8 (codenamed Apollo).

The platform is expected to bring along a wide range of improvements when compared to the current flavor of the OS, such as support for multi-core application processors, microSD memory cards and for NFC connectivity, among others. 

However, even if the platform will be offering capabilities similar to those included in Google’s Android operating system, mobile phone makers might not flock to launch devices powered by it. 

Instead, PC makers around the world are expected to make such devices available, a recent article on DigiTimes notes. 

Nokia will bring to the market handsets running under Windows Phone 8, as part of the agreement it signed with Microsoft last year. However, other vendors are not likely to commit to spending too much on the development of such smartphones, the news site suggests. 

Instead, PC vendors such as Acer, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Dell are expected to start developing handsets running under the mobile OS, industry sources confirmed. 

The poor performance that the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango platform has seen so far is the main reason for which handset vendors such as HTC, Samsung, or LG are moving away from Microsoft’s mobile OS, it seems. 

Nokia was expected to help the platform gain some more market share, but the company’s first devices running under it, the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710, haven’t benefitted from great performance on shelves so far. 

Of course, Windows Phone 8 will bring along a nice set of enhancements over the existing OS flavors, even if the latter will be improved as well.

Helped by Nokia and the upcoming changes, Windows Phone is expected to become the second mobile OS in the world in the coming years, some of the latest analyst reports suggested.

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HTC Flyer Gets Its First Ice Cream Sandwich Port, Unofficial

HTC's first try on tablets, the Flyer was initially launched with Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system on board. After many months of waiting, the tablet has finally received its Android 3.2 Honeycomb upgrade.

For the time being, it's unclear if HTC will roll out an Ice Cream Sandwich update for HTC Flyer in the future. However, those who already purchased the tablet and consider themselves savvy enough to flash an unofficial ICS ROM can do so courtesy to the folks over at XDA Developers.

XDA forum member AidenM has just ported successfully an Ice Cream Sandwich ROM on the HTC Flyer. Apparently, this is the first unofficial Android 4.0 ROM for HTC's tablet, so we should assume that it does come with at least a few bugs and features that won't work.

Obviously, one of the main problem will be to make the Pen working, which won't be an easy feat for any developer who tries to cook or port an unofficial Ice Cream Sandwich ROM on the HTC Flyer.

Sadly, users won't be able to take notes using the Pen, but, hopefully, this problem will be corrected in a future update. Other things that have been reported as NOT working include: camera, Bluetooth support, HTC Apps (not correctly sized for screen), rotation is a bit blurry and pixelated, and some setting panes are not functional (Keyboard selector).

Still, there are quite a slew of features that are fully functional, such as: Wi-Fi support, Android Market access, touch capabilities, external SD, ADB access, rotation, as well as AOSP lockscreen.

HTC Flyer owners who are eager to flash this ROM on their tablets should know that they need to be Honeycomb S-OFF. Then, simply copy the ROM on the root of an SD card and run it from there.

Check out the video below to have a glimpse of how it looks. For more details on how to install this ROM head over to the original thread.

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Windows Phone Tango, Tango 2 and Apollo in 2012

Before the end of this year, we should see three different flavors of Windows Phone being delivered to devices, recent reports suggest. 

First of them will be Tango, which is said to arrive in the March-April timeframe, and which should bring support for 120 languages and for entry-level hardware into the mix. 

Next, we’ll see Tango 2 being released on devices sometime in mid-2012, yet info on what it will bring new to the ecosystem hasn’t been unveiled as of yet. 

In fall of 2012, Microsoft will push out the Windows Phone 8 platform version, codenamed Apollo. In early 2013, large volumes of WP8 devices are expected to arrive on the market, DigiTimes reports. 

One of the companies committed to deliver Windows Phone 8 devices is Nokia. What remains to be seen is whether HTC, LG, Samsung and other vendors will launch similar smartphones as well.

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Nokia to Kill Symbian with N8 Successor

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia will send the Symbian platform to the graveyard sooner than originally announced, if the latest reports on the matter are to be believed. 

There will be only one new Symbian model pushed to shelves from Nokia, and it will arrive as the successor of the Nokia N8 flagship phone. 

Nokia will continue to deliver updates to existing customers, but it does not plan on making available for purchase new models running under the platform, The Register reports. 

Most probably, the handset vendor will continue producing existing Nokia Belle devices, but it has put an end on the development of new models. 

A year ago, Nokia announced plans to adopt Microsoft’s Windows Phone as its primary operating system for smartphones, and to reduce development of Symbian devices. 

However, it did commit to the release of new Symbian devices, and even said that it expected to sell around 150 million such phones before the platform went into the ground in a few years. 

But things turned out unexpectedly, and sales of Symbian devices dropped below the forecast figure. 

During the company’s earnings call for the fourth quarter of the last year, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said that was so due to changing market conditions. 

“We now believe that we will sell fewer Symbian devices than we previously anticipated,” he said. 

Apparently, this was the final hit for Symbian. In Nokia’s opinion, any continuation of efforts to keep the platform alive will be in vain. Thus, it has decided to stop the development of new devices. 

For the time being, Nokia did not deliver a confirmation on the matter, and there’s no telling on what will happen with the Symbian developers that Accenture took from Nokia. Nor with the people at Nokia who have been still working on Symbian-related projects. 

However, if things are indeed so, the mobile phone maker will unveil its plans soon, so stay tuned to learn the news.

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HP Promises Windows 8 Tablets, x86 Configurations Arrive First

Hewlett Packard is one of the manufacturers set to bring to the market tablet PCs running under Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 platform. 

The company’s CEO Meg Whitman confirmed this in a recent interview with CRN, but did not offer specific info on when devices might hit stores.

One thing that she did confirm, however, was that products featuring the x86 architectures will be released before ARM-based ones. 

“We have to have a tablet offering. We will be back in that business. We're coming back into the market with a Windows 8 tablet, first on an x86 chip and then maybe on an ARM chip,” she said. 

Tablet PCs will help the company remain at the top of the PC market, though Meg Whitman is confident that the vendor could remain a leader even without such a device. “We'll see. I'm pretty sure we'll be able to do that,” she said.

What remains unclear at the moment is when the Windows 8 platform arrive with support for ARM tablets, Whitman said: “Windows 8, we don’t know when the delivery is for that software on an ARM chip.”

Recent reports suggested that Microsoft was actually advancing nicely with the development of Windows 8 on ARM, and that the software could be pushed to shelves with the platform for x86 devices. 

However, it has been long said that ARM tablet PCs to run under the Windows 8 platform will not be released before the end of this year, while Intel-based devices will hit shelves in Q4. 

Meg Whitman’s sayings appear to confirm the fact that ARM devices running Windows 8 will be released at a later date. 

Microsoft has yet to confirm any details on the availability of Windows 8 devices. The company might do so later this month, when the beta flavor of the operating system becomes publicly available.

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ASUS SeaShell 11.6-Inch AMD-Based Netbook Set for March

Netbooks may have lost most of their fame, but ASUS still thinks there are enough people out there who might want one, especially when that “one” has an AMD APU at its core. 

Advanced Micro Devices may not have paid much mind to the mobile PC market over the years, but that changed when its Heterogeneous Computing architecture (previously known as Fusion) debuted. 

With the E-Series of APUs (accelerated processing units) out and about, the Sunnyvale, California-based company slowly began to secure design wins. 

One of those design wins is the ASUS Eee PC SeaShell 1225B. 

This portable consumer electronics device measures 11.6 inches in diagonal and has a screen resolution of 1376 x 768 pixels. 

An AMD E450 APU acts as the heart: the two x86 cores have a clock speed of 1.65 GHz and the video performance is provided by the Integrated AMD Radeon HD 6320 GPU. 

The chip features the Turbo Core dynamic overclocking technology as well. 

In addition to the APU, the SeaShell 1225B comes with 4 GB of RAM (random access memory) and a hard drive unit (HDD) with a capacity of 750 GB. 

Furthermore, a pair of USB 3.0 ports (SuperSpeed connectivity at 5 Gbps) are part of the spec sheet, along with one USB 2.0 connector, HDMI, VGA, a card reader and a webcam with protection lock. 

Finally, the operating system is Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit and, for wireless connectivity, ASUS tossed in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 802.11 N. 

All of the above are packed inside a white case with improved finishing and a trackpad with integrated mouse buttons. 

The review posted on NetbookLive mentions that customers from the United States may want to wait for a second version of the laptop to become available. 

It will be cheaper and equipped with an AMC C60 APU and, most likely, a different, non-64-bit OS and a lower amount of RAM as well.

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Deep Cool Gamer Storm Assassin CPU Cooler Gets Ready to Hit Retail

Announced back in May of last year, Deep Cool’s Gamer Storm Assassin CPU cooler is now getting ready to hit retail for the equivalent of $80 US, about 61 EUR. 

Taking only a short look at the Assassin, this wouldn't appear to differentiate itself too much from the all the other twin tower coolers available in the market, but, moving closer, one gets to see that the company went with a unique heatsink concept which uses a diamond-shaped pattern.

While Deep Cool didn't reveal too much about this technology, it appears that its role is to lower the turbulence produced by the installed fans.

In turn, this could help lower the system's noise as the Assassin can be fitted with no less than three cooling fans.

Only two fans are shipped together with the Assassin, one measuring 140mm while the other measures 120mm, and the larger of these two is placed right between the twin towers to draw hot air through the heatsink. 

The second one is placed so that it could push fresh air into the Assassin and both of these come with a rubber cover frame to minimize vibrations.

The heat dissipated by the fans is drawn from the copper base covering the CPU through eight 6mm thick heatpipes.

No information regarding the maximum cooling capacity of the Assassin was provided, but the cooler looks like it will be able to keep up with pretty much any high-performance CPU available out there, even when overclocked.

The Deep Cool Assassin is shipped together with a universal mounting system, which supports all of Intel's and AMD's recent sockets, including LGA 2011, LGA 1155, LGA 1366 and AM3+. 

Deep Cool still hasn’t mentioned when the Assassin CPU cooler hits retail, but Expreview says this is bound to happen soon.

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Super Talent Quad-Channel DDR3 Memory Works at 1866MHz

Memory maker Super Talent has just announced the introduction of a new line of high- speed DDR3 memory compatible with quad-channel desktop computers.

The Super Talent memory modules will be available both in a kit form and as standalone DDR3 sticks, but no matter the option one choses, all of these feature similar specs with speeds starting at 1600MHz and going up to 1866MHz.

No matter they speEd they run at, all the modules come with support for XMP 1.3 profiles, require 1.5V in order to operate and use Super Talent’s special high-profile memory heatspreader which should help the memory modules run cool even when they are overclocked.

Extreme Memory Profile, or XMP for short, is an SPD extension developed by Intel for DDR3 DIMMs to encode high-performance memory timings.

This basically means that users who don't want to spend their time optimizing memory frequencies and timings can simply go into motherboard's BIOS and select one of the XMP profiles saved by the manufacturer to run the kit at its full speed.

“Gamers and enthusiasts already know about Intel’s i7-3960X 6-Core processors and now they are scrambling to find DRAM worthy of their new rig,” said a company rep. 

“The Quadra, DDR3 Quad-kits, come in 1600 MHz and 1866 MHz and pairs perfectly with the i7 processors, which now handles 4 channels of memory. 

“By fully populating all 8 slots of memory with Super Talent’s 4GB DIMMs, users will experience reduced loading times with all their high-system-requirement programs. Now more time can be spent using a computer than waiting on it.”

Availability and pricing info also wasn’t provided by the maker and a quick Google search also hasn’t returned any results, meaning that these have yet to arrive into retail.

When they will however make their entrance into the market, Super Talent plans to introduce both 8GB and 16GB memory kits.

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