Well i already failed the post a day challenge I gave myself. However I’m not overly shocked by that failure. But I’ll just get right back on that horse and see if i can find a rhythm.
Anyway…
One feature I’ve always wished would be added to the iPad is the ability to select a default browser rather than always being forced to Safari every time that I click on a link. Apple doesn’t seem interested in adding that functionality. Normally the “walled garden” approach that Apple has adopted doesn’t bother me. I like that for most things the device just works. Still some of the things Apple seems anxious to lock down make little sense to me, especially from a usability standpoint. Maintaining control isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however singsong a strangle hold is, and that’s what it feels like Apple is intent on doing sometimes. With all that in mind I finally decided it was time to jailbreak my iPad.
Greenpois0n was recently updated allowing an untethered jailbreak of iOS 4.2.1. I read up on it and skimmed a couple forums to see if people had been experiencing very bad things when using it to jailbreak their iPads. Other than a couple incidents which read like idiot user syndrome rather than an issue with the software, I didn’t find many negative reports. So after backing up my iPad I decided to take the plunge.
I followed the instructions I found on padgadget.com which seemed simple enough, but the update kept failing. Each time my ipad booted back in to its normal non-jailbroken self so I wasn’t worried about bricking it(I did a complete back up of it before I started). After looking around a bit I found some advice on a couple of forums that worked like a charm. Basically I had to use the terminal to open up greenpois0n directly from the .app package rather than double clicking the pretty icon. For whatever reason opening it via the terminal worked and the loader for Cydia showed up on my iPad. It was only about ten minutes from start to the point where Atomic was set as my default iPad browser.
Not bad for a days work – which could have been only a few minutes of work if I hadn’t ran in to problems initially. So far everything seems to be working well and I haven’t had any stability issues.
Just a Man with a Mash Paddle 