The Hickensian

16.05.08 Installing Summerboard Themes

15 comments
Tagged with: hacks, iphone, summerboard, themes

Screenshot of shelves theme

I recently had a go at installing the excellent Wood Shelves Summerboard* theme on my iPhone, but found the process of adding a theme manually a blind stumble. It involves using SFTP to connect to the phone, but various tutorials had outdated information, and I had to cobble together the various snippets until I got it to work.

So, just in case this is useful for someone else, here’s how I got it to work. This assumes you’ve already jailbroken your iPhone, and have installer.app and Summerboard installed, ready and waiting for you.

How to connect to your iPhone (1.1.4) and add a Summerboard theme:

Via Installer.app, install BSD Subsystem and OpenSSH (found in the ‘System’ Category)
Go to Settings> Wi-Fi > (Network Name) and click on the blue arrow to get your IP address.
In Transmit (or other SFTP capable app), enter the following information to connect:
- IP Address
- Username: root
- Password: alpine (not ‘dottie’!)
- Mode: SFTP
Once connected, navigate to /private/var/mobile/Library/Summerboard/Themes. There are, it seems, 2 locations for Summerboard themes, but for the 1.1.4 iPhone, this is the one SMB prefs reads from – iPod Touch may be different.
Upload the theme folder and change permissions on the folder (and its contents) to 755

The theme will now show up in the SMB prefs menu! Hurrah!

Vishal Parpia reminded me that you should disable SFTP by removing OpenSSH afterwards, otherwise your iPhone becomes eminently hackable. If you can work out how to change the root user password, so much the better!

*(a theming app for the iPhone and iPod Touch’s ‘Springboard)

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No.1

∞ Hamish M said 634 days ago:

An excellent, and succinct guide, Jon.

And that Wood Shelves theme looks fantastic, I’ll have to try it out.

No.2

∞ Dave S. said 634 days ago:

I actually wrote up the process myself, but it’s buried in the icon zip file I put out a while ago. I’ve since updated it so it should work with everything up to current firmware, but I guess it’s not exactly Googleable is it?

No.3

∞ Marius B said 634 days ago:

Lovely shelves! Hope we here in Norway will get to taste some iphone soon…me wants it…By the way, thanks for all yr great write-ups!

No.4

∞ Jon Hicks said 633 days ago:

Shame on you Dave – you should know zip files aren’t indexable. You could’ve saved me a lot of trouble here!

No.5

∞ Blaze said 633 days ago:

I recommend installing AFP for iPhone if you plan to do this often. Makes your iPhone pop up in Finder like any other network share.

No.6

∞ Gunnar Hafdal said 633 days ago:

Nice tutorial. Just wanted to say that it is the same file location for a 1.1.4 iPod Touch.

No.7

∞ Mats Lindblad said 633 days ago:

So Apple thought that connection to your phone using a cord was too simple? Or downloading a theme online and putting it in a folder and the USING it was to much of a hassle?!

SFTP:ing to your phone? Are you serious? What about e-mailing it?

No.8

∞ Erin Ross said 633 days ago:

HIghly recommend Dave Shea’s Chalkwork ‘theme’ (he lists it as icons but it fits SummerBoard’s theme requirements as well – other than having to install it yourself like your instructions above):

http://www.mezzoblue.com/icons/chalkwork/iphone/

The wood shelves theme s’alright but Chalkwork is Nicey McNice :)

No.9

∞ Jon Hicks said 633 days ago:

@Mats – You do know that this is a hack, and not something Apple implemented don’t you?

No.10

∞ Sahil said 632 days ago:

I think an easier way would have been to just install community sources, and then clicked the Themes (Summerboard) category.

I’m pretty sure that theme is already there, and would save you doing the SSH and stuff (though that may come in handy later anyways).

- Sahil.

No.11

∞ Jon Hicks said 632 days ago:

It wasn’t available via community sources as far as I could see, hence the manual upload. Anyway, I intend to make my own theme at some point, so this way is easier!