If you have an iDevice running iOS 9.2 or 9.3.3, by now you might have realized that the latest jailbreak from Pangu comes bundled with a series of issues.

First of all, the certificate used to sign the jailbreak IPA expires in 7 days, meaning that if your certificate gets expired, you’ll need to install the jailbreak IPA again. However, Pangu now offers the option to use an embedded certificate effective until April 2017. This means that, before April 2017, you will not need reinstall the Pangu jailbreak app.

The second issue that users are facing consists in the fact that the jailbreak leaves basically no free space in the /System partition, so that is nearly impossible to install any 3rd party package on the (newly) jailbroken device. This has also been noted by a few users of Needle, who raised some issues on Github:

Hi, as you can see from the error log you posted above:

failed in buffer_write(fd) (7, ret=-1): backend dpkg-deb: No space left on device

the device you are using has no space left on disk. If you want to install other tools you’ll have to free up some space first. – Marco Lancini

Stashing (the dangerous way)

Stashing basically means moving several folders containing iOS system components (like Wallpapers, Ringtones, etc.) to /var/stash, in order to make space on the system partition.

Many tutorials can be found online that explains how perform this action on a jailbroken iOS 9.X:

These tutorials, however, suggest a different approach: rather than stash iOS system components, they recommend to stash the tweaks and themes from Cydia instead.

Even though it is supposed to be a safer approach than traditional stashing, this resulted in (many) devices being bricked.

Stashing (without bricking devices)

The rough process is:

  • the system fonts are stored in /System/Library/Fonts
  • we can move them to /private/var (which is where we have loads of space)
  • then we can create a unix symlink in the old location pointing to the new one

If we take a look at the available space before this procedure, we see that / is fully utilised:

marcos-iPod:~ root# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/disk0s1s1  2.7G  2.7G     0 100% /
devfs            47K   47K     0 100% /dev
/dev/disk0s1s2   13G  878M   12G   8% /private/var

Let’s proceed to stash the system fonts:

marcos-iPod:/private/var root# mv /System/Library/Fonts/ /private/var/
marcos-iPod:/private/var root# ln -s /private/var/Fonts /System/Library/Fonts

If we check again, we can now see that we freed 140M on /, which for example are more than enough to install all Needle’s dependencies:

marcos-iPod:/private/var root# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/disk0s1s1  2.7G  2.6G  140M  95% /
devfs            47K   47K     0 100% /dev
/dev/disk0s1s2   13G  1.2G   11G  10% /private/var

[Please note that even this method is not bulletproof!.]