Word Virus

I’ve been trying to remember how to do this for a couple of days, since I realized I’m almost out of free space on the root partition of my iPhone. Starting with the 2.0 firmware, Apple changed the root partition from 300mb to 500mb, in order to handle the changes to the firmware.  However, they also increased the size of the OS. As most jailbreakers know, the jailbreak software is installed to this partition. This means that you can quickly run out of space.  I was down to 25mb, and knew this wouldn’t last me much longer.

In the past, I have always used BossTools to free up space, but this application no longer works on 3.x firmware. The thing to remember about the iPhone OS, is that all of the OS, including fonts, is located in the firmware package.  Fonts account for over 75mb of the 500mb total. The easiest way to fix this, is to simply move the fonts to the mobile partition. All the official iPhone software is installed under the user “mobile”. All you have to do is move the Fonts to this user’s directory.

The easiest way to do this is through a symbolic link. First, connect to your iPhone through SSH.

ssh root@iphoneIP
The  password is “alpine”

Next, move the fonts from their current location, to the other partition and create the symbolic link.

mv /System/Library/Fonts /var/mobile/
cd /System/Library/
ln -s /var/mobile/Fonts .

Just to clarify, that is a “.” at the end of that last line.

It really is that simple. You will suddenly gain another 75 or so MB on your root partition.