Selling Expectations

UPDATE (17/4/08): The tutorial below is no longer relevant if you have upgraded to Pwnage v1.1. An updated post will be on the way, probably early next week.

Digg this :-) – http://digg.com/apple/Create_your_dream_iPhone_iPod_Touch_Firmware

So I’ve had a bit of a play around with the new Pwnage tool for ‘pwning’ your iPod Touch or iPhone, and while the tool itself is a little boring, it opens up a whole new world of things for your friend in your pocket.

To start off with, I’ll walk you through adding applications (games, tools, etc) to your custom IPSW file.
But.. why?
Picture this – disaster strikes and you have to restore your iPod. But you’ve set it up just the way you like it – you’ve got games, tools and more on there. If you have to restore it – it’ll go back to factory fresh condition – you’ll lose everything you’ve added.
But this is where custom firmwares would come in handy. Simply make your own dream firmware, then when you restore it to your iPod, everythings there, without you having to download everything again.

Interested? Full instructions after the break!

Okay – let’s begin.
First, you’ll need to find what you want to be in your firmware.
The easiest way would be to download them all on your iPod, then copy them over. Since Pwnage is Mac Only for now anyway – there’s a really easy way to copy your apps over. More info available here.
UPDATE: phoen!x has suggested iphonedisk to copy files from your iPod Touch/iPhone. Havent tested it, but you can give it a go if you don’t have WiFi.

It’s easiest if you copy them to your desktop for later
So you’ve got your apps ready? Let’s continue.

Find PwnageTool.app on your Mac, and make a backup of it (rename it too if you like – I called mine bPwn. this is the one I’ll be editing)
Next, right click on the one you want to copy (I’m using my backup), and select ‘Show Package Contents’ from the list that appears.

Open up the Contents > Resources folder, and there will be about 6 different folders in there, one for each different firmware.
Open the one for your device (iPod1,1_1.1.4_4A102 in my case), and go to the Core > Applications folder.

Now dump your desired apps in here :-) (Beware – there is a limit on how many you can have in there, I believe it’s around 25MB, so watch out!)

Another thing to note is that you can’t add things like AFPd and such in here, as they have to copy frameworks to other folders, such as the ‘bin’ folder. You could probably give this a go – but I havent tried this.

So, got everything how you like it? Everything under 25MB? Good, now close the folders, and open up the PwnageTool that you just modified. Load the original unmodified Apple IPSW (Make sure it’s the same number as the firmware folder you edited earlier), and do the ‘iPwner’ on your device if you havent done so already.

Almost there !

Now, click on IPSW builder – this will build your own custom firmware, complete with the apps you added earlier.

Now we’re on the home stretch – restoring your iPod / iPhone. :-)

Beau’s Note: You could probably even do an update if you’re already on the firmware you’re restoring to, say if you wanted to add more apps. But, it’s more trouble than it’s worth, so we’ll restore for now.

Connect your device to iTunes, and option-click restore. Then you’ll be able to browse to the firmware you just made, select it, and let it do it’s thing.

Congratulations – you have just made your own IPSW file that jailbreaks & installs your favourite apps, so you won’t have to download anything else.

Or, as ‘Poseidon79‘ calls it; your own dream firmware :-)

UPDATE: So after a bit more playing around – some of the apps were not working. To fix this – you’ll need to change the permissions on the files to at least 755. Unfortunately I’m not sure if you can do this in OSX before you transfer it over, so for now the only way I know that works is to SFTP in, which means that you’d have to install OpenSSH, etc.
Nevertheless, I’ll keep working on it.
UPDATE 2: Check out my follow up post if you havent already :-)

UPDATE 3: Cleaned up the post & added a little more info. Also, people have said that this method will only work for apps that don’t require the BSD subsystem, unless you can manually install it (drop the BSD files in the right folders basically :P)

Hope the above guide helped (at least some of) you 1337 iPhone h4×0rz.

Cheers,
Beau