If you had unfettered access to the iPhone’s wallpapers, icons, ringtones and the rest – both preloaded and to add your own – what would you do first?  Well, IRC channel #iPhone members are claiming to have gained just such access, and they’ve changed… the position of the Safari icon.  Seriously, though, this is a potentially big moment in iPhone hackery; using a serial console, a bit of resistor soldering (though nothing permanent on your handset, naturally) and some command squirting you end up with full shell access.

Instructions from here (remember, you follow these at your own risk, and will of course need the appropriately fashioned cable):

Breaking out of chroot jail

Okay in normal mode files are accessed using afc.
You’ll need to change Services.plist and fstab

Add two more params to afcd, “-d”, and “/”
Change the fstab to mount /dev/disk0s1 rw

Upload these two files to the sandbox
Enter recovery with the button combo
Type “grestore” in the recovery shell

Now you are in restore mode
cmds:
FileSystemCheck /dev/disk0s2
Mount /dev/disk0s1 /mnt1
Mount /dev/disk0s2 /mnt2

Use ditto to copy the files to their proper locations
The sandbox in at /mnt2/root/Media, Heavenly is in /mnt1
Services.plist and fstab need to go back into heavenly

Reboot and have fun

They’re busy putting a shopping list of parts to make the cable adapter together over at ModMyiPhone.

If you try it, do let us know how you get on in the comments.

[via ModMyiPhone]