iPhone Alley is reporting that the Mac OS X 10.5.6 update is causing problems for the jailbreaking community. According to a recent post at the site, if you place the iPhone in DFU mode (similar to a restore mode), your iPhone will be unrecognized by a Mac running 10.5.6.

DFU mode is required to jailbreak your iPhone using many of the popular tools such as Pwnage or QuickPwn. So far there is no word from the iPhone Dev group on this finding. In doing our own research, we discovered that the problem does, in fact, exist. So, if you need to jailbreak your iPhone/iPod touch, you might want to hold off on updating your Mac.

Could this be Apple's way of combating owners who jailbreak their iPhones? Has this happened to you since upgrading your Mac to 10.5.6? Let us know in the comments!

[via iPhone Alley]

Call it the Touchable Penguin. OK, the touchscreen drivers aren't there yet, but the simple, scrolling shell output of a Linux kernel running on the iPhone represents a big achievement for the iPhone Dev Team and dev lead 'planetbeing.' The build is far from complete -- no wireless networking, no sound, no writeable support for the NAND flash memory -- but it's still very cool, and the effort involved was substantial (the team had to reverse-engineer the iPhone's boot loader so they could write their own).

Having a working Linux kernel on jailbroken iPhones and iPod touch handhelds might seem frivolous, but imagine the ability to run other touch phone OS platforms on top of an iPhone (like, perhaps, Android)... very tempting. You can see more of the rationale behind the Linux-on-iPhone project here, or you can skip to the second half of this post to see the video.

[via Engadget & Erica]

The dev team has released PwnageTool and QuickPwn for iPhones and first generation iPod touch devices, for those who want to upgrade to firmware 2.2.

Important: If you have a 3G iPhone and you want to unlock it in the near future, you cannot use QuickPwn and must use PwnageTool (currently available for Mac users only). As the dev team explained yesterday, the 2.2 update for the 3G iPhone also upgraded the baseband. In order to achieve a jailbreak and keep future soft-unlock options available, you must use PwnageTool to create a custom .ipsw file that preserves the 2.1 baseband but provides the software functionality of a 2.2 update. Read the entire dev team posting for complete instructions.

Users with first generation iPod touches, 2G (first gen) iPhones, factory unlocked iPhone 3Gs or users who have no desire to soft-unlock their iPhone 3G can use the QuickPwn tool. Neither PwnageTool nor QuickPwn work with the second generation iPod touch. The dev team has already said that its current focus is the 3G unlock and then they will look into working on the new iPod touch.

If you just want to use Installer.app on your 2G or 3G iPhone and don't want to go through the jailbreak process, check out Pusher from RiP Dev. It works with 2.2 and doesn't open the system partition when writing information, making it a potentially safer jailbreak alternative.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in! And thanks Josh for the RiP Dev tip!

• Black TiAlN
• Glowing Apple logo
• Macro shots with the camera
• The iPhone-powered Lego mobile

We have pwnage. Before you get too excited, we're talking just iPod touch -- the update that's been around since Tuesday afternoon -- not for iPhone 2.1, released this morning. That having been said, point your browser over to quickpwn.com to grab the latest version of the iPod QuickPwn.

Now there is good news, and there is bad news, about jailbreak and iTunes 8. The bad news is that Apple has taken countermeasures against custom ipsw firmware bundles. The good news is that the iPhone devteam folks are working on patches for each of the device types in addition to the touch.

Hop over to the devteam blog to keep abreast of the latest news.

• Support for iPhone/iPod touch firmware 2.0.2 5C1
• Updated version of Installer.app beta 6
• New .de localization for German speaking users