Posted by Pwnster on
August 22, 2008
Jailbreaking the iPod Touch Firmware 2.0.1
What you need:-
- iTunes 7.7+
- Winpwn 2.0.4
- Firmware file for 2.0.1 iPod Touch [Demonoid] / Firmware file for iPod Touch 2.0.1 [Direct Apple]
What you do:-
- Install iTunes and Winpwn.
- Connect your iPod Touch to your PC and open up WinPwn.
- Winpwn will not allow you to do anything without selecting a firmware file. Click “Browse .ipsw” button and select your firmware image from your desktop/any other place you saved it. Note: Be sure to select the right firmware image for your iPod Touch.
- Next, we need to build the iPod software image. Click “IPSW Builder” and you will be presented with some screens. Start on the Applications tab. On this screen you must select “Install Cydia”. As far as installer goes, feel fee to select it if you want. But do not select installer instead of Cydia. Cydia has all the apps. Installer does not and installer is still very beta as of August 9, 2008 and contains virtually no packages to install. If you select installer, also select Cydia.
- Click the custom images tab. Here you can select custom boot images. This is optional.
- Skip the Payload tab.
- Partition resizer. With the current version fo Winpwn, move this to 550 mb. The extra packages will fill the root partition before Cydia gets to run and move things about. Do not make it any larger though as Cydia moves your applications around properly to the larger partition so if you resize this larger here you are just losing space.
- Click “Build .ipsw” at the bottom of the window. Save the file to some place sensible so you can find it. Try your documents or your desktop. Winpwn will start working and finally you will see the success box which might takea couple of minutes.
- Back to the main screen, select iPwner. This will ask you to select your custom firmware we just built in step 8 select that file/image. You will see a dialouge box saying ‘iTunes has been pwned’ your work with Winpwn is done.
- Now we need to get the iPod Touch into DFU mode which is not very easy for many but hold the Power and the Home button for exactly ten seconds and then you may leave the power button but you need to keep holding the home button [Note : Your iPod Touch should be connected to your PC while you're doing this]
- iTunes will launch on it’s own now you restore with the shift + restore method. Press the shift button and click on the restore tab. Select the custom firmware you just made using Winpwn. Remember that your iPod should not be on during this process it should have a completely blank screen.
- NOTE: We are not responsible about what goes wrong with whatever you do. Remember to take a backup of your iPod Touch because you will loose your personal data and your music. And also when everything is done and iTunes asks if you wanna restore your iPod with a previous backup select ‘NO’ We however do take responsibilty about the links provided in the post and if you follow the exact instructions you will be able to jailbreak your iPod. If you however cannot do it and you need help be sure to leave a comment with the nature of the issue you face clearly described and we will get back to you. Also do not update to 2.0.2 unless there is Winpwn available for it yet.
Be free =)
Next post is gonna be about how to get all those fancy games and apps for free on your jailbroken iPod Touch :P
Posted by Sumit on
July 23, 2008
Command Line Ctrl+Alt+Del
A cheery hello to all geekshoppers. This is your friendly neighborhood geek ^^
*sputter* *hang* aaarggghh.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del and most of the times the world is back to normal again. But see the catch is, the Task Manager (The friendly application you pull up by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del) is also, well, an application with a handsome GUI and everything. And loading it up when your system is already dying is a touch difficult at times.
Enter the cmd. For those of you who don’t know what that is, cmd is the command line. It is a kind of an emulation of DOS (the dark predecessor to Windows) from within Windows. Anyway, you can call up cmd by going to Start>Run and typing cmd in the “open” line and pressing enter. Alternatively, you could just press the Windows key+R on your keyboard and the run window will appear.
Going for the kill via the command line/cmd makes things more efficient and faster.
You will need to use 2 commands, tasklist and then tskill OR tasklist and then taskkill. Details of their use follow:
Tasklist: Summon up tasklist by, err , typing “tasklist” on cmd. It will show you a list of all the running processes on your computer. What you need to care about is the memory usage and the PID (process ID) of that program. Any program running on your system is identified by its Process ID and so obviously, we use it to kill a program if we need to.
There are some parameters that can be passed to tasklist to modify its output as per our requirement.
tasklist /v : More information about things like Status, User name, Window Title etc.
Filtering processes: You can filter processes based on multiple parameters. However, if you are in a “about to be/nearly hanged” kind of a situation, you can simply use the following commands to to find processes that are not responding.
tasklist /fi "status eq not responding"
Use the folliwing to list the processes eating up more than “X” MB.
tasklist /fi "memusage gt X000"
Becoming a tasklist pro: Use tasklist /? to gain more insights about the whole tasklist phenomenon.
(NOTE: Tasklist comes bundled with Windows XP Professional, but it does not come with the Home edition. But no worries, those with the Home version of XP can download it here (Rapidshare) or here (non Rapidshare) and can put it in the system path. See how to put things in your system path at the end of this post.)
Tskill : This command is used to end a process, using its name or its PID (Process ID).
Kill with name: Use tskill processname to kill a process with name “processname”.
Kill with PID: Similarly use tskill processid to kill a process with PID processid. (Obvilously, Tasklist can be used to find the PID of a process.)
Professional Killers: To get more info on advanced syntax of the command use tskill /?
(NOTE: You get Tskill with both Windows XP Professional and Home :) .)
Taskkill : Taskkill is essentially tskill, but with more bang for your buck. Apart from specifying the PID or the name of the process to kill, we can use filters to kill the matching processes (as in tasklist).
Kill with name: Use taskill /IM imagename to kill a process with the given Image name. For example:taskkill /im notepad.exe /f (forces notepad to be killed.)
Kill with PID : Use taskill /PID processid to kill a process with the given processid.
Filtering Taskkill: Processes to be killed can be filtered based on multiple parameters. But what what we are essentially interested in doing is use the command to forcefully shut down all the processes that are not responding/eating up too much of our memory.
Killing Not responding programs:
taskkill /f /fi "status eq not responding"
Close down all programs using more than X MB.
taskkill /f /fi "memusage gt X000"
Help?: To get more info on advanced syntax of the command use taskkill /?
(NOTE: Taskkill is only a part of Windows XP Professional. But then again, this is the Geekshop. Download it here (Rapidshare), or here (Non Rapidshare).)
PS: Adding stuff to your system path:
Go to Start and right click on My Computer.
Go to properties and System Properties window will open up. Go to the tab called “advanced” and click on “Environment Variables”.
Go to the System Variables section and select “path” in it. Click “Edit” after selecting path variable.
At the end of the long list of already present statements, add “;” and enter the complete path of the folder where you have kept taskkill/tasklist. (Something like c:\mysecretfolder\taskkill). Save it and taskkill/tasklist should be accessible from your command line.
Alternatively, you could simply paste the exe files in WINDOWS/system32 folder.
Posted by Pwnster on
July 15, 2008
iPod Touch Firmware 2.0 available For Free
So, the firmware 2.0 is out for both the iPhone and the iPod Touch, the iPhone users get it as a free update while the iPod Touch users have to pay 10$ [Thats around 420 Rupees] for it. Unfair? Totally.
Now there are rumors going around on why Apple charges the iPod Touch users, is it because they don’t have a great amount of users out there? Maybe, or is because they don’t get any monthly income from the iPod Touch users? Yeah, that makes sense.
So anyway I was snooping around and I found this great guide to update your iPod Touch to firmware 2.0 without paying a dime!
Follow the steps below :-
- Get iTunes 7.7 if you don’t already have it.
- Connect your iPod Touch.
- Hold down Shift and click ‘Restore’ after all the sync is complete. [Click on your iPod's name to see details about your iPod, the update feature, the way you sync and the Restore feature]
- Select the iPod1,1_2.0_5A347_Restore.ipsw
- Wait for the process to be completed.
Remember to take a BACKUP of all your iPod contents, even if iTunes does take one, you still need to take a backup of all your songs and videos. Take a backup using a free software called iDump, available here or any other iPod back up software you trust, I personally believe iDump is the best damn’ thing out there.
I am asking you to take a backup because we are restoring the iPod instead of updating it. Your setting will remain the same though and other things like your calender appointments and notes will remain as they were and that’s because iTunes takes a backup of everything.
After the iPod restarts after being ‘restored’ iTunes will give you an option of keeping your settings or setting up a new iPod.
Now the firmware has been tested by me and it worked fine on my iPod Touch, 16GB on a Windows XP Machine.
For more information about how to get the firmware, (iPod1,1_2.0_5A347_Restore.ipsw in the guide) you can just Google it.
(Update: the link posted in the Harman Badwaja (WTF!) in the comments section works.)
Disclaimer : We however do not take responsibility about anything in the post, obviously this is a electronics gadget and things can go wrong. So please read and re-read the article and follow the steps exactly and make sure you take a backup.
PS: You can use various softwares to join the parts if you download the firmware in parts.
For files ending in .rar.part1 etc., use Winrar. For others,
I recommend Split & Concat for the Mac OS X
Posted by Sumit on
June 14, 2008
[How To] Installing Windows XP on Dell XPS 1530
As Jayesh said in his last post, we are going to appeal to more people and more genres. So here it is, “The Santa Geekshop”
So you got a fresh new laptop. Spent some 60K to make it into a monster of a machine. All the Core 2 goodness coupled with multi gigs of ram and what not.
Enter Windows Vista.
Wow.
The “Aero” and (dog) “flips” amaze for the first few runs but then a question pops to mind. Why is my sweet sweet machine running as if I am running a Pentium 2 machine with 64 MBs of RAM? You suddenly realize that you may have bought a bust machine and break into a sweat. Then you decide to call up your friendly neighborhood geek and he promptly informs you “Windows = Sh*t” and “Vista = Sh*t Unleashed, get Linux/Mac”.
But we, here at The Drunk Santa, are here to inform you otherwise. Vista still blows, but you still have XP SP2. It is possibly one of the best Operating Systems ever made and we insist you buy an original copy as soon as you can. Because the Microsoft Genuine Advantage is just so very orgasmic. And because we fear karma. Maybe the roadside CD-wallah at VT/Lamington will help you in this regard. But be sure to check if its original or not. That is what counts.
Note: Beyond this point, this post will deal with how to install Windows XP on a Dell 1530 since that is what I have. Things may work with other Dell/Non Dell models. You can try if you are a bit adventurous. Links to the XP drivers have also been included.
Step 1: Backup all data in a drive other than the C: drive on your computer. Or preferably in an external drive.
Step 2: Restart. Press F2 to get into the BIOS. Follow these steps, or else the XP CD will refuse to detect your Hard Disk. (The arrow keys the tab key and the enter key are what you need to work with the BIOS. Pressing Enter on any section’s name with a “+” next to its name expands it. You will need to expand the 2nd section to get to the options mentioned below.)
2.1: Go to the section called SATA Operation and select the ATA option in place of AHCI.
2.2: Go to the Flash Cache Module section and select OFF in place of Enabled.
There are other ways around this but, well, they are more complex and I don’t really like typing all that much. You won’t really notice any difference in terms of performance, security, stability and all other such buzzwords.
Step 3: Save and Exit. Your laptop will restart now.
Step 4: Press any key when it tells you to. (You need to have the original XP disk in your drive before this.)
Step 5: Press “Enter” and keep on accepting all the nonsense.
Step 6: On the partition screen read the instructions and delete the C: drive. ONLY DELETE THE C: DRIVE IN CASE YOU HAVE BACKED UP YOUR DATA IN OTHER PARTITIONS.
Step 7: Create a new partition from the empty space created on deleting the C: drive. Its simple, you just have to read the instructions on that screen keep pressing the required keys.
Step 8: Select the freshly created C: and press Enter. Select Quick format from the list of options that appear.
Step 9: Keep pressing next, next and more nexts. When your laptop restarts, don’t “press any key” when it asks you to.
Step 10: You will get your copy of XP installed in around 30-45 minutes. ( It is pretty straightforward and umpteen guides exist for installing XP on the computer. Just google it. :) )
Step 11: Ahh. All is well but you don’t have any sound. And no Ethernet. And nothing else for that matter. Officially Dell has no XP drivers for this machine. But it does have drivers for other machines with the same parts in them. So after some research, I’ve come up with the XP drivers for XPS. 1330 users will need a different driver for their Ethernet. All the other drivers should work though.
Bluetooth Drivers
Fingerprint Drivers
Ethernet Drivers
Touchpad Drivers
Graphics (Nvidia) Drivers
Dell Quickset
Remote Control Drivers
Sound Drivers
Sys Utilities Drivers
Webcam Drivers
WiFi Drivers
Update:
Here are the chipset drivers (Will solve the “no drivers found for base system device” problem)
These drivers are the same as those that ship in the drivers DVD. They work fine with XP too.
And so here you are! All the windows goodness with no almost no Blue Screen of Death and blazing performance. Have Fun!
Disclaimer: The author(s) do not accept any responsibility for anything that may go wrong while you try this out. Although, I have tried and tested this technique umpteen times on my own machine, there can never be any guarantees. I suggest you read the guide carefully and follow the steps exactly. Best take a printout and keep it with you if you are doing this for the first time.