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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>10 April 2001 - Graph of Busybox Growth </b>
87 <br> The illustrious Larry Doolittle has made a PostScript chart of the growth
88 of the Busybox tarball size over time. It is available for downloading /
89 viewing <a href= "busybox-growth.ps"> right here</a>.
91 <p> (Note that while the number of applets in Busybox has increased, you
92 can still configure Busybox to be as small as you want by selectively
93 turning off whichever applets you don't need.)
95 <li> <b>10 April 2001 -- BusyBox 0.51 released</b>
98 BusyBox 0.51 (the "rock-solid release") is now out there. This
99 release adds only 2 new applets: env and vi. The vi applet,
100 contributed by Sterling Huxley, is very functional, and is only
101 22k. This release fixes 3 critical bugs in the 0.50 release.
102 There were 2 potential segfaults in lash (the busybox shell) in
103 the 0.50 release which are now fixed. Another critical bug in
104 0.50 which is now fixed: syslogd from 0.50 could potentially
105 deadlock the init process and thereby break your entire system.
108 There are a number of improvements in this release as well. For
109 one thing, the wget applet is greatly improved. Dmitry Zakharov
110 added FTP support, and Laurence Anderson make wget fully RFC
111 compliant for HTTP 1.1. The mechanism for including utility
112 functions in previous releases was clumsy and error prone. Now
113 all utility functions are part of a new libbb library, which makes
114 maintaining utility functions much simpler. And BusyBox now
115 compiles on itanium systems (thanks to the Debian itanium porters
116 for letting me use their system!).
119 <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a> for
120 complete details. BusyBox 0.51 can be downloaded from
121 <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox">ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox</a>.
125 <li> <b>Busybox Boot-Floppy Image</b>
127 <p>Because you asked for it, we have made available a <a href=
128 "ftp://opensource.lineo.com/busybox/busybox.floppy.img"> Busybox boot floppy
129 image</a>. Here's how you use it:
133 <li> <a href= "ftp://opensource.lineo.com/busybox/busybox.floppy.img">
134 Download the image</a>
136 <li> dd it onto a floppy like so: <tt> dd if=busybox.floppy.img
137 of=/dev/fd0 ; sync </tt>
139 <li> Pop it in a machine and boot up.
143 <p> If you want to look at the contents of the initrd image, do this:
146 mount ./busybox.floppy.img /mnt -o loop -t msdos
147 cp /mnt/initrd.gz /tmp
149 gunzip /tmp/initrd.gz
150 mount /tmp/initrd /mnt -o loop -t minix
154 <li> <b>15 March 2001 -- BusyBox 0.50 released</b>
157 This release adds several new applets including ifconfig, route, pivot_root, stty,
158 and tftp, and also fixes tons of bugs. Tab completion in the
159 shell is now working very well, and the shell's environment variable
160 expansion was fixed. Tons of other things were fixed or made
161 smaller. For a fairly complete overview, see the
162 <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
164 lash (the busybox shell) is still with us, fixed up a bit so it
165 now behaves itself quite nicely. It really is quite usable as
166 long as you don't expect it to provide Bourne shell grammer.
167 Standard things like pipes, redirects, command line editing, and
168 environment variable expansion work great. But we have found that
169 this shell, while very usable, does not provide an extensible
170 framework for adding in full Bourne shell behavior. So the first order of
171 business as we begin working on the next BusyBox release will be to merge in the new shell
172 currently in progress at
173 <a href="http://doolittle.faludi.com/~larry/parser.html">Larry Doolittle's website</a>.
177 <li> <b>27 January 2001 -- BusyBox 0.49 released</b>
180 Several new applets, lots of bug fixes, cleanups, and many smaller
181 things made nicer. Several cleanups and improvements to the shell.
182 For a list of the most interesting changes
183 you might want to look at the <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
185 Special thanks go out to Matt Kraai and Larry Doolittle for all their
186 work on this release, and for keeping on top of things while I've been
189 <em>Special Note</em><br>
191 BusyBox 0.49 was supposed to have replaced lash, the BusyBox
192 shell, with a new shell that understands full Bourne shell/Posix shell grammer.
193 Well, that simply didn't happen in time for this release. A new
194 shell that will eventually replace lash is already under
195 construction. This new shell is being developed by Larry
196 Doolittle, and could use all of our help. Please see the work in
197 progress on <a href="http://doolittle.faludi.com/~larry/parser.html">Larry's website</a>
198 and help out if you can. This shell will be included in the next
202 <li> <b>13 December 2000 -- BusyBox 0.48 released</b>
205 This release fixes lots and lots of bugs. This has had some very
206 rigorous testing, and looks very, very clean. The usual tar
207 update of course: tar no longer breaks hardlinks, tar -xzf is
208 optionally supported, and the LRP folks will be pleased to know
209 that 'tar -X' and 'tar --exclude' are both now in. Applets are
210 now looked up using a binary search making lash (the busybox
211 shell) much faster. For the new debian-installer (for Debian
212 woody) a .udeb can now be generated.
214 The curious can get a list of some of the more interesting changes by reading
215 the <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
217 Many thanks go out to the many many people that have contributed to
218 this release, especially Matt Kraai, Larry Doolittle, and Kent Robotti.
224 For the old news, visit <a href="http://busybox.lineo.com/oldnews.html">the old news page</a>.
228 <!-- Begin Download section -->
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231 <A NAME="download"><BIG><B>
235 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
238 <li> Source for the latest release can always be downloaded from
239 <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox">ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox</a>.
241 <li> A new snapshot of the source is made daily and is available as a GNU
242 gzipped tarball <a href="busybox.tar.gz"> right here</a>.
244 <li> BusyBox now has its own publically browsable
245 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb/busybox/">CVS tree</a>,
247 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cvs_anon.html">CVS access</a>, and
248 for those that are actively contributing there is even
249 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cvs_write.html">CVS write access</a>.
254 <!-- Begin Docs section -->
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257 <A NAME="docs"><BIG><B>
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262 Current documentation for BusyBox includes:
264 <li> <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/BusyBox.html">BusyBox.html</a>.
265 This is a list of the all the available commands in BusyBox with
266 complete usage information and examples of how to use each app. I
267 have spent a <em>lot</em> of time updating these docs and trying to
268 make them fairly comprehensive. If you find any errors (factual,
269 grammatical, whatever) please let me know.
270 <li> <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/README">README</a>.
271 This is the README file included in the busybox source release.
272 <li> <a href="http://bugs.lineo.com/db/pa/lbusybox.html">BusyBox Bugs</a>.
273 Need to report a bug? Need to check if a bug has been filed?
274 <li> If you need more help, the BusyBox
275 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/lists/busybox/">mailing list</a> is
276 a good place to start.
280 <!-- Begin Links section -->
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289 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
293 <li> <A HREF="http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/">
294 Free Software from Bruce Perens</A><br>
295 The original idea for BusyBox, and all versions up to 0.26 were written
296 by <A HREF="mailto:bruce@perens.com">Bruce Perens</a>. This is his BusyBox website.
299 <li> <A HREF="http://freshmeat.net/projects/busybox/">
300 Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox</A>
302 <li><a href="http://tinylogin.lineo.com/">TinyLogin</a>
303 is a nice embedded tool for handling authentication, changing passwords,
304 and similar tasks which nicely complements BusyBox.
307 <li><a href="http://cvs.uclinux.org/uClibc.html">uClibc</a>
308 is a C library for embedded systems. You can actually statically link
309 a "Hello World" application under x86 that only takes 4k (as opposed to
310 200k under GNU libc). It can do dynamic linking too and works nicely with
311 BusyBox to create very small embedded systems.
314 <li> <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/software.html">Other cool embedded software</a>.
317 <li> <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/">opensource.lineo.com</a>.
320 <li> <A HREF="http://www.lineo.com/">Lineo</A> is sponsoring BusyBox development.
326 <!-- Begin Projects section -->
328 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
329 <A NAME="projects"><BIG><B>
330 Products/Projects Using BusyBox
333 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
335 <p> I know of the following products and/or projects that use BusyBox --
336 listed in the order I happen to add them to the web page:
339 <li> <a href="http://www.lineo.com/products/embedix_linux/">Lineo Embedix Linux</a>
340 <li> <a href="http://cvs.debian.org/boot-floppies/">Debian installer (boot floppies) project</a>
341 <li> <a href="http://www.linuxrouter.org/">Linux Router Project </a>
342 <li> <a href="http://linux-embedded.org/">LEM</a>
343 <li> <a href="http://www.toms.net/rb/">tomsrtbt</a>
344 <li> <a href="http://www.stormix.com/">Stormix Installer</a>
345 <li> <a href="http://www.emacinc.com/linux2_sbc.htm">EMAC Linux 2.0 SBC</a>
346 <li> <a href="http://www.trinux.org/">Trinux</a>
347 <li> <a href="http://oddas.sourceforge.net/">ODDAS project</a>
348 <li> <a href="http://www.kerbango.com/">The Kerbango Internet Radio</a>
349 <li> <a href="http://www.linuxmagic.com/vpn/">LinuxMagic VPN Firewall</a>
350 <li> <a href="http://byld.sourceforge.net/">Build Your Linux Disk</a>
351 <li> <a href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~ichi/baslinux.html">BasicLinux</a>
352 <li> <a href="http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/recovery">Zdisk</a>
353 <li> <a href="http://www.adtran.com">AdTran - VPN/firewall VPN Linux Distribution</a>
354 <li> <a href="http://mkcdrec.ota.be/">mkCDrec - make CD-ROM recovery</a>
355 <li> <a href="http://recycle.lbl.gov/~ldoolitt/bse/">Linux on nanoEngine</a>
356 <li> <a href="http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/"> Floppyfw</a>
358 <li> <a href="http://midori.transmeta.com/"> Midori Linux</a> - <a href=
359 "http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,42399,00.html"> Article on
360 Midori Linux</a> on <a href= "http://www.wired.com"> Wired</a>. Quote from
361 Erik at the top of <a href=
362 "http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,42399-2,00.html"> this
367 <p> Do you use BusyBox? I'd love to know about it and I'd be happy to link to
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384 <font size="-1" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">
385 Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to
386 <a href="mailto:andersen@lineo.com">Erik Andersen</a><BR>
387 The Busybox logo is copyright 1999,2000,2001, Erik Andersen.
392 <a href="http://www.vim.org"><img border=0 width=88 height=32
393 src="images/anim.written.in.vi.gif"
394 alt="This site created with the vi editor"></a>
398 <a href="http://www.gimp.org/"><img border=0 width=88 height=38
399 src="images/gfx_by_gimp.gif" alt="Graphics by GIMP"></a>
403 <a href="http://www.linuxtoday.com"><img width=90 height=36
404 src="images/ltbutton2.jpg" alt="Linux Today"></a>
408 <p><a href="http://slashdot.org"><img width=90 height=36
409 src="images/sdsmall.gif" alt="Slashdot"></a>
413 <a href="http://freshmeat.net"><img width=90 height=36
414 src="images/fm.mini.jpg" alt="Freshmeat"></a>