Been working on creating an iphone cydia repo for a while using a virtual machine.

The problem has always been getting the initial setup done, and then getting the ports to forward correctly.

Here’s the template that I’ve been trying:

In the world of Debian APT/dpkg, anything you can install is a “package”. These packages exist in the form of .deb files, which have a rather arcane (which, to the software historian, may be read as “fascinating”) internal format that this guide will not bore the reader with. At a high level, a .deb contains the files that are going to installed as part of the package, and “control” information which comprises metadata about the package (its name, size, and other sundry details). The construction of such a file is done using the tool dpkg-deb. Users of Debian (or Fink on a Macintosh, which is also based on APT) will already have this package installed, but users of almost any other platform are able to install it easily, or may do this work on their iPhone itself. To then make a package, we need only prepare a folder that contains the files we want to install as they would appear on the iPhone’s filesystem. Additionally, we will add a single directory called DEBIAN to the root of our package to house a file called “control”, which will contain our metadata. If, for example, we want to install a program and a LaunchDaemon for MyProgram, we (depending on what we were installing, of course) may end up with the following directory structure: