Installer.app troubleshooting

Though officially sanctioned third-party applications are, by Apple’s estimation, less than six weeks away, unofficial “jailbreak” applications distributed through Installer.app continue to enjoy widespread popularity. As an unofficial application itself, however, Installer.app is subject to some significant troubleshooting issues. The following is a guide to some of the more common problems encounter with the application.

First let’s look at some important information about the way Installer.app works.

The app stores configuration files in ~\Library\Installer and /var/mobile/Library/Installer. Here are the files you will find there:

• LocalPackages.plist list of applications currently installed used by the uninstall feature to remove apps. This is the most important file and therefore you might consider keeping a backup copy of this file in a safe place after performing any installations. Loss of this file means that you cannot uninstall the applications and rebuilding the file is tedious at best and not recommended.
• PackageSources.plist list of all the application sources the installer is currently using for installations. Keeping a backup of this file is also recommended since it contains a list of your favorite application sources.
• RemotePackages.plist list that is generated every time the sources are refreshed. Contains all the packages available excluding the packages already in your LocalPackages.plist.
• Temp the directory used for temporary file storage used by installers for downloaded content, zip files, extracted files, etc.
• TrustedSources.plist list of all sources that the Installer App trusts. Attempts to install an application that is not from a trusted source results in a warning message to the user. Trusted sources would be for example Nullriver and other community sources.

The plist files are like OS X basic text XML files that should be edited very carefully. If you don’t know what you are doing be sure to ask someone for help. It’s important that the XML/HTML tags in the file are correctly formatted.

You can troubleshoot Installer App in iPhone OS 1.1.3 or higher by opening a terminal window on your Mac or PC and using SSH to access your iPhone (as described in our guide). After connecting via SSH, run these commands:

• Su mobile
• Enter /Applications/Installer.app/Installer to run Installer App
• Use Installer App as you would normally and watch the terminal window. It will display useful debugging information as Installer App goes through it’s steps to perform the action that you selected.

Next, let’s look at some common problems that you might encounter while using the Installer Application and how to fix them.

Installer Application Opens and Closes Immediately Try reinstalling the installer application especially if it does this from the start. However if it used to work and now it’s not working then the issue is probably caused by something else. Therefore you might consider plist corruption. On firmware version 1.1.3 or higher the plist files are located at /var/mobile/Library/Installer. We recommend backing up these files periodically especially after installing applications.

Problems Installing Applications or Main Execution Script Failure Now that Installer App allows for queuing application installations you might encounter this problem where when you try to install or uninstall an application it refuses to leave the queue. Applications will refuse to leave the queue until either of these processes is successful. This means this error will repeat itself as the application tries to install or uninstall again. You might also check the Installer App’s permissions since to work correctly under OS 1.1.3 or higher it has to be owned by root and have 755 attributes. Fix these using SSH with the following commands:

• Chmod +s /Applications/Installer.app/Installer
• Chown –R root:wheel /Applications/Installer.app

If none of this works you might want to contact the developer for the application you are trying to install. Debugging it yourself could prove to be very time intensive.

Installation Fails and Installer Quits Most likely you are out of disk space. The iPhone has two partitions. The space used to store your media (music, videos, etc.) is the larger of the two. Therefore the smaller partition is the one that’s running out of free space. There is an application called BossTool that will allow you to move fonts, ringtones, or applications to the media partition.

Installer Takes To Long Loading Sources or Duplicate Updates>/b> We discovered that if you loaded multiple sources for applications that 1) Installer App takes way to long to refresh or 2) when updating applications if it exists in more than one source you can encounter multiple entries for the same application often with version conflicts. We suggest that you only install community sources and not add any extra ones. If you see duplicates in the updater remove some of the sources. The problem is that if you don’t clear some of the sources you mind find yourself endlessly looping for updates, etc.