Cатсн²² (in)sесuяitу / ChrisJohnRiley

At some point in the last 24 hours Saurik released a couple of updates to Mobilesubstrate through Cydia. Usually I try to keep updated with the latest and greatest (I’m a technology junkie) so I ran the upgrade will I grabbed my morning cup of tea (I’m also English after all). Normally after an upgrade you’ll see a prompt to restart springboard, however with this update the phone rebooted part way through the install. A worrying signal. After the reboot everything seemed to be fine, except Cydia refused to start fully. After showing the default Cydia screen fir a few seconds, Cydia would disappear.

After a couple of reboots to make sure the issue wasn’t going to solve itself, I had a quick look on Saurik’s twitterfeed but he had no mention of the issue. Several followers however were having the same issue. Time to find a solution.

I dropped to the terminal (although making an SSH connection would also have done the trick) and su’d to root. For those new to this the default password for root is alpine and if you’ve upgraded to version 3.0 this WILL have been reset. So change the root and mobile users passwords using ‘passwd’ before somebody else connects and does Anyway, I digress.

After getting root access it’s time to see what state the mobilesubstrate and cydia packages were in. After an ‘apt-get update’ (to get the updated package lists) and and ‘apt-get install cydia’ it looks like the package is corrupted, as I’m prompted to run the dpkg configure

dpkg --configure -a

After this is completed, I reran the ‘apt-get install cydia’, and then an ‘apt-get upgrade’ to reinstall the failed mobilesubstrate and  in my case the new VoIP 3G app. After another reboot (type reboot at the prompt or whatever your preferred method is) things seem to be running fine again.

For those with short attention spans .:

• Shell access (terminal or ssh)
• Su to root
• dpkg --configure -a
• apt-get update
• apt-get install cydia (if this fails add –fix-missing)
• apt-get upgrade (to install mobilesubstrate correctly)
• reboot

I hope this solves your issues as easily as it did mine. Let me know if you have any issues.

Update: There are a few other guides going around telling you to connect the iphone to your system (or useiFile) and then delete specific files. I’ve not tested these fixes, but the chance of deleting files you need are always there. I’d suggest using the easy fix using apt-get before trying the file deletion route. However it’s a personal choice.

Update: As a few comments have noted, the nice people at wordpress reformed the -- into a single – when displaying the page. This should now be fixed using the magic trickery of HTML comments to split the two characters –>