It is becoming more and more increasingly difficult to jailbreak our devices. Once upon a time, when new hardware or software was released, there was a small interim period when the researchers tinkered with a few things and then voila, we had a viable jailbreak. Unfortunately, those days are long gone and with Apple releasing new devices and versions of iOS which contain fewer vulnerabilities and bugs, the production of tools capable of giving us the all important untethered jailbreak is getting harder.
But even when we do manage to find a vulnerability, exploit it, produce a way to inject the untethered files and then package it all into a working piece of software for mass distribution, the battle isn’t over, still. In iOS 4, we started to notice that even after the jailbreak had been completed, certain things weren’t working as expected, this was particularly evident amongst the iBooks application. After further investigation it seemed that Apple had included a device check, basically meaning that when the application is launched; it performs a self analysis of the device to see whether or not it is jailbroken.
The result of this check was however, the application crashing back to the SpringBoard immediately after launch. This issue was resolved by updating the ‘Corona’ package in Cydia to version 1.0-5. With the help of developer xvolks, the update managed to rectify the crashing issue. It seems as though we owe a debt of gratitude once again to developer PlanetBeing, who has put more of his personal time into resolving another reported issue with iBooks, which occurred when trying to view certain content being protected by the digital rights management technologies.
PlanetBeing estimated that the issue occurred approximately 10-20% of the time and resulted in images and text not displaying correctly. The issue has been resolved by a further Corona update through Cydia which was initially pushed to version 1.0-6. However, a quick follow up Tweet by Jay Freeman acknowledged an issue with the initial 1.0-6 update which had a dependency built-in, making it impossible to install on the original iPad.
Corona version 1.0-7 is now live in Cydia and is a recommended install (or update) for all jailbroken users (including A4 and A5 devices, except iPhone 3GS old bootrom) running iOS 5.0.1, no matter how the device was jailbroken.
For instructions on jailbreaking iPhone 4S and iPad 2, you can simply follow our step by step guide posted here to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 using Absinthe on Windows or Mac. For those of you with iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad 1, and iPod touches can use Redsn0w or Sn0wbreeze to untether jailbreak on iOS 5.0.1.
Update: Corona has just been updated to version 1.0-8, bringing in support for iPhone 4S (on iOS 5.0).
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