For the very first time, I was able to Jailbreak my iPhone last night (3.0 firmware version) and it was easier than I thought. So far, I love the fact that I can change the theme (from screensaver screen down to its icons). The 'Backgrounder' add-on is also a handy tool that allows an application to stay open while you're in another application. I've experimented with quite a few already and have spent numerous hours messing with them. There was a point when I needed to re-name a theme's icon and the only way to accomplish this is through SSH.
Although I'm not going to go through the Jailbreak process, one add-on that you must install in your Jailbroken iPhone is an add-on called OpenSSH. This add-on allows your machine to access the iPhone through SSH, which is not possible by default.
The next step is to have some sort of way to connect to the iPhone by means of SSH. Since I use Windows, I like using PuTTY since it's straight-forward, although I've also read that iPhone's files can be accessed through FTP. In most cases, since your machine and iPhone will be on the same network, you should be able to freely access the phone. The tricky part is knowing the IP of your phone, but this can be located via Settings/Wi-Fi>(Your Network)>IP Address. Initially in my case, the IP Address was blank, so another option is to go through the router's configuration and lookup all active machines that are connected to the network.
Connecting through PuTTY is just a matter of entering the IP Address and click "Open" (port 22). The default username is "root" and the password being either "alpine". The password can be changed by typing in "passwd" and it should be pretty straight forward from that point. You will need to rehash some basic Linux/Unix commands in able to work within iPhone's file structure. To keep it short and simple, anything that has something to do with media can be located by: root#ls Media /Library. The command will show all the files relative to the current root path, and the folder are named conventionally well to what it contains.
- Dennis