With jailbroken iPhones, iPod touches and iPads, you get a lot of freedom in the choice of apps to run on your device. Cydia, Rock, Icy and any other alternative installers bring a plethora of useful applications that can change the way you use your device – making it smarter and more efficient. One feature, however, that is missing in almost all the installers is the lack of ability to manually install a DEB application file. Yep, you cannot install any debian software package file present on your iPhone’s hard disk directly without using a command-line based terminal or emulator.
Sure, if you have terminal (or MobileTerminal, the device-based GUI Terminal emulator), installing a package is a piece of cake. However, my dilemma was to install MobileTerminal in the first place on my device, since it has never been properly released on Cydia and the only thing I had was a .deb file in my Windows 7-based computer. Fortunately, using a little tweaking of the iOS file system, Cydia allows you to auto-install DEB packages without using any emulator/command line interface.
In this article, I will break down that process step-by-step, using a Windows 7 32-bit PC, iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3.3 and jailbroken with redsn0w (it really doesn’t matter how you jailbroke the device as long as you have Cydia installed). On the device end, you also need to have OpenSSH installed and running (available free on Cydia).
On your PC, you need any application that can browse the file system of your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad at root access level. My choice here is the free iPhone Explorer. Alternatively, you can choose to SSH into your device using Cyberduck.
iPhone Explorer works via USB connection, so make sure that your device is plugged into the PC and iTunes is installed. If using SSH, both the device and the computer should be on the same WiFi network.
Step One
Launch iPhone Explorer with your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad connected via USB. You should be able to see the device listed in left pane, and file structure in the right pane.
Navigate to Root Directory/var/root/media
Step Two
If you don’t have a folder here labeled ‘Cydia’, you’ll need to create one manually.
Right-click in the right-hand pane of iPhone Explorer and select ‘Add New Folder.’ Name the folder Cydia.
Step Three
Navigate inside the newly-created Cydia folder. If you already had the folder there, see if there is an ‘AutoInstall’ folder inside it, Otherwise, right-click and select Add New Folder again to create an AutoInstall directory.
Step Four
Now, double-click to enter the AutoInstall folder. Using Windows Explorer, locate the .deb file that you need to install, and drag & drop it inside this folder. You may put in as many DEB packages as you like.
Step Five
With the files fully copied to your iOS device, all you need to do is power off the phone and power it back on, twice! After the second reboot, you’ll see the applications installed on your springboard as well as in Cydia packages.
Alternatively, you can also try rebooting once and only respringing the second time. That has also worked for some people.
Did this method work for you? You comments will help us learn more.
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Fodor
August 15, 2011
Worked for me with ONLY 1 reboot. I’ve installed MULTIPLE deb’s !Thank u !
David
August 26, 2011
The easier way to do this is with http://www.i-funbox.com. It’s free and you simply drop the .deb into the cydia app install folder. After one reboot it’s done. No setting up the folders and searching about.
nordik_14
January 17, 2012
im sorry but it wasn’t installed. It turn off and on twice and it didn’t work. Im installing also mobile terminal. Any other idea? Thanks