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18 <B>B u s y B o x</B>
23 <a href="/"><IMG SRC="images/busybox2.jpg" alt="BusyBox" border="0" width="360" height="230"></a><BR>
26 <!-- Begin Introduction section -->
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31 <A NAME="intro"> <BIG><B>
32 The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux
35 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
37 BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single
38 small executable. It provides minimalist replacements for most of the utilities
39 you usually find in fileutils, shellutils, findutils, textutils, grep, gzip,
40 tar, etc. BusyBox provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any small or
41 embedded system. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than
42 their full featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide
43 the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts.
45 BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind.
46 It is also extremely modular so you can easily include or exclude commands (or
47 features) at compile time. This makes it easy to customize your embedded
48 systems. To create a working system, just add /dev, a kernel, and a shell.
49 For a really minimal system, you can even use the busybox shell (not Bourne compatible, but very small and quite usable), and the busybox vi editor.
52 BusyBox is now maintained by
53 <a href="http://codepoet.org/andersen/erik/erik.html">
54 Erik Andersen</a>, and its ongoing development is being sponsored by
55 <a href="http://www.lineo.com/">Lineo</a>.
57 BusyBox is licensed under the
58 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE</a>.
64 <p> Because everybody loves screenshots, a screenshot of BusyBox
65 is now available <a href="screenshot.html">right here</a>.
68 <H3>Mailing List Information</h3>
69 BusyBox now has a <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/lists/busybox/">mailing list</a>!
70 To subscribe, go and visit <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/mailman/listinfo/busybox">this page</a>.
72 <!-- Begin Latest News section -->
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81 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
85 <li> <b>7 July 2001 -- BusyBox 0.52 released</b>
88 I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of
89 BusyBox 0.52 (the "new-and-improved rock-solid release"). This
90 release is the result of <em>many</em> hours of work and has tons
91 of bugfixes, optimizations, and cleanups. This release adds
92 several new applets, including several new shells (such as hush, msh,
97 <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a> covers
98 some of the more obvious details, but there are many many things that
99 are not mentioned, but have been improved in subtle ways. As usual,
100 BusyBox 0.52 can be downloaded from
101 <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox">ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox</a>.
106 <li> <b>10 April 2001 - Graph of Busybox Growth </b>
108 The illustrious Larry Doolittle has made a PostScript chart of the growth
109 of the Busybox tarball size over time. It is available for downloading /
110 viewing <a href= "busybox-growth.ps"> right here</a>.
112 <p> (Note that while the number of applets in Busybox has increased, you
113 can still configure Busybox to be as small as you want by selectively
114 turning off whichever applets you don't need.)
117 <li> <b>10 April 2001 -- BusyBox 0.51 released</b>
120 BusyBox 0.51 (the "rock-solid release") is now out there. This
121 release adds only 2 new applets: env and vi. The vi applet,
122 contributed by Sterling Huxley, is very functional, and is only
123 22k. This release fixes 3 critical bugs in the 0.50 release.
124 There were 2 potential segfaults in lash (the busybox shell) in
125 the 0.50 release which are now fixed. Another critical bug in
126 0.50 which is now fixed: syslogd from 0.50 could potentially
127 deadlock the init process and thereby break your entire system.
130 There are a number of improvements in this release as well. For
131 one thing, the wget applet is greatly improved. Dmitry Zakharov
132 added FTP support, and Laurence Anderson make wget fully RFC
133 compliant for HTTP 1.1. The mechanism for including utility
134 functions in previous releases was clumsy and error prone. Now
135 all utility functions are part of a new libbb library, which makes
136 maintaining utility functions much simpler. And BusyBox now
137 compiles on itanium systems (thanks to the Debian itanium porters
138 for letting me use their system!).
141 <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a> for
142 complete details. BusyBox 0.51 can be downloaded from
143 <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox">ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox</a>.
147 <li> <b>Busybox Boot-Floppy Image</b>
149 <p>Because you asked for it, we have made available a <a href=
150 "ftp://opensource.lineo.com/busybox/busybox.floppy.img"> Busybox boot floppy
151 image</a>. Here's how you use it:
155 <li> <a href= "ftp://opensource.lineo.com/busybox/busybox.floppy.img">
156 Download the image</a>
158 <li> dd it onto a floppy like so: <tt> dd if=busybox.floppy.img
159 of=/dev/fd0 ; sync </tt>
161 <li> Pop it in a machine and boot up.
165 <p> If you want to look at the contents of the initrd image, do this:
168 mount ./busybox.floppy.img /mnt -o loop -t msdos
169 cp /mnt/initrd.gz /tmp
171 gunzip /tmp/initrd.gz
172 mount /tmp/initrd /mnt -o loop -t minix
180 For the old news, visit <a href="http://busybox.lineo.com/oldnews.html">the old news page</a>.
184 <!-- Begin Download section -->
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187 <A NAME="download"><BIG><B>
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194 <li> Source for the latest release can always be downloaded from
195 <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox">ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox</a>.
197 <li> A new snapshot of the source is made daily and is available as a GNU
198 gzipped tarball <a href="busybox.tar.gz"> right here</a>.
200 <li> BusyBox now has its own publically browsable
201 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb/busybox/">CVS tree</a>,
203 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cvs_anon.html">CVS access</a>, and
204 for those that are actively contributing there is even
205 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cvs_write.html">CVS write access</a>.
210 <!-- Begin Docs section -->
212 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
213 <A NAME="docs"><BIG><B>
217 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
218 Current documentation for BusyBox includes:
220 <li> <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/BusyBox.html">BusyBox.html</a>.
221 This is a list of the all the available commands in BusyBox with
222 complete usage information and examples of how to use each app. I
223 have spent a <em>lot</em> of time updating these docs and trying to
224 make them fairly comprehensive. If you find any errors (factual,
225 grammatical, whatever) please let me know.
226 <li> <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/README">README</a>.
227 This is the README file included in the busybox source release.
228 <li> <a href="http://bugs.lineo.com/db/pa/lbusybox.html">BusyBox Bugs</a>.
229 Need to report a bug? Need to check if a bug has been filed?
230 <li> If you need more help, the BusyBox
231 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/lists/busybox/">mailing list</a> is
232 a good place to start.
236 <!-- Begin Links section -->
238 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
245 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
249 <li> <A HREF="http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/">
250 Free Software from Bruce Perens</A><br>
251 The original idea for BusyBox, and all versions up to 0.26 were written
252 by <A HREF="mailto:bruce@perens.com">Bruce Perens</a>. This is his BusyBox website.
255 <li> <A HREF="http://freshmeat.net/projects/busybox/">
256 Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox</A>
258 <li><a href="http://tinylogin.lineo.com/">TinyLogin</a>
259 is a nice embedded tool for handling authentication, changing passwords,
260 and similar tasks which nicely complements BusyBox.
263 <li><a href="http://cvs.uclinux.org/uClibc.html">uClibc</a>
264 is a C library for embedded systems. You can actually statically link
265 a "Hello World" application under x86 that only takes 4k (as opposed to
266 200k under GNU libc). It can do dynamic linking too and works nicely with
267 BusyBox to create very small embedded systems.
270 <li> <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/software.html">Other cool embedded software</a>.
273 <li> <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/">opensource.lineo.com</a>.
276 <li> <A HREF="http://www.lineo.com/">Lineo</A> is sponsoring BusyBox development.
282 <!-- Begin Projects section -->
284 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
285 <A NAME="projects"><BIG><B>
286 Products/Projects Using BusyBox
289 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
291 <p> I know of the following products and/or projects that use BusyBox --
292 listed in the order I happen to add them to the web page:
295 <li> <a href="http://www.lineo.com/products/embedix_linux/">Lineo Embedix Linux</a>
296 <li> <a href="http://cvs.debian.org/boot-floppies/">Debian installer (boot floppies) project</a>
297 <li> <a href="http://www.linuxrouter.org/">Linux Router Project </a>
298 <li> <a href="http://linux-embedded.org/">LEM</a>
299 <li> <a href="http://www.toms.net/rb/">tomsrtbt</a>
300 <li> <a href="http://www.stormix.com/">Stormix Installer</a>
301 <li> <a href="http://www.emacinc.com/linux2_sbc.htm">EMAC Linux 2.0 SBC</a>
302 <li> <a href="http://www.trinux.org/">Trinux</a>
303 <li> <a href="http://oddas.sourceforge.net/">ODDAS project</a>
304 <li> <a href="http://www.kerbango.com/">The Kerbango Internet Radio</a>
305 <li> <a href="http://www.linuxmagic.com/vpn/">LinuxMagic VPN Firewall</a>
306 <li> <a href="http://byld.sourceforge.net/">Build Your Linux Disk</a>
307 <li> <a href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~ichi/baslinux.html">BasicLinux</a>
308 <li> <a href="http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/recovery">Zdisk</a>
309 <li> <a href="http://www.adtran.com">AdTran - VPN/firewall VPN Linux Distribution</a>
310 <li> <a href="http://mkcdrec.ota.be/">mkCDrec - make CD-ROM recovery</a>
311 <li> <a href="http://recycle.lbl.gov/~ldoolitt/bse/">Linux on nanoEngine</a>
312 <li> <a href="http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/"> Floppyfw</a>
314 <li> <a href="http://midori.transmeta.com/"> Midori Linux</a> - <a href=
315 "http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,42399,00.html"> Article on
316 Midori Linux</a> on <a href= "http://www.wired.com"> Wired</a>. Quote from
317 Erik at the top of <a href=
318 "http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,42399-2,00.html"> this
321 <li> <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">Linux Terminal Server Project</a>
322 <li> <a href="http://www.devil-linux.org/">Devil-Linux</a>
326 <p> Do you use BusyBox? I'd love to know about it and I'd be happy to link to
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343 <font size="-1" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">
344 Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to
345 <a href="mailto:andersen@lineo.com">Erik Andersen</a><BR>
346 The Busybox logo is copyright 1999,2000,2001, Erik Andersen.
351 <a href="http://www.vim.org"><img border=0 width=90 height=36
352 src="images/written.in.vi.png"
353 alt="This site created with the vi editor"></a>
357 <a href="http://www.gimp.org/"><img border=0 width=90 height=36
358 src="images/gfx_by_gimp.png" alt="Graphics by GIMP"></a>
362 <a href="http://www.linuxtoday.com"><img width=90 height=36
363 src="images/ltbutton2.png" alt="Linux Today"></a>
367 <p><a href="http://slashdot.org"><img width=90 height=36
368 src="images/sdsmall.png" alt="Slashdot"></a>
372 <a href="http://freshmeat.net"><img width=90 height=36
373 src="images/fm.mini.png" alt="Freshmeat"></a>