If you were one of the many people who were eagerly awaiting the iOS 5.0.1 untethered jailbreak, then I am pretty sure that on December 27th you took the plunge and liberated your device as soon as the tools were released by the development teams. Although everything may have seemed perfectly functional at first, chances are that if you attempted to launch iBooks, or various other applications then you would have experienced a crash.
The crash experience by the iBooks application isn’t a new event, Apple apparently have this built into the application bundle in an attempt to fight jailbreaking. Fortunately for the jailbreaking world, a resolution had already been created and is relatively painless to overcome.
A tweak called iBooksFix2 is available through a Cydia repository which is reported to resolve the issue. There is also an alternative method which allows users to fix the problem manually, but had been reported to cause issues with the device syncing with iTunes, so obviously not an ideal solution.
Developer Xvolks had also released a tool called xBooks which fixes the issue and was specifically created for use after the Corona jailbreak. However, the xBooks ‘tweak’ never made it onto an official Cydia repository for download due to repositories rejecting it for being a stop gap solution, favoring to wait on the untether authors to provide an actual full time and reliable solution. From what I can gather, the xBooks tweak is considered a brutal hack due to the fact that it moves the actual location of the iBooks application rather than fix the problem.
Fortunately for the community, the spirit of good will and team work that we have recently become accustomed to seems to be continuing. With Pod2g working with the Chronic Dev Team, iPhone Dev Team, PlanetBeing and Saurik to produce the A5 jailbreak we are seeing a combined community effort that we have not been used to in the past. Xvolks has also been working with Pod2g to resolve the iBooks situation. Recent blog posts from the two developers have confirmed that they have managed to patch the kernel in Corona to make iBooks work without the need for xBooks.
The work includes sandbox patches created by legendary hacker, Comex but has only been tested on an iPhone 4 at this stage. Xvolks is hoping that iPhone Dev Team member MuscleNerd can test, amend and implement the fix for other devices then release the package.
If you have been benefiting from the xBooks solution, you will need to totally remove the package from your device, then remove and reinstall iBooks from the App Store.
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