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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>
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31 <A NAME="intro"> <BIG><B>
32 The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux
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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. You can even use
49 the busybox shell 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>.
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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.)
121 For the old news, visit <a href="http://busybox.lineo.com/oldnews.html">the old news page</a>.
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135 <li> Source for the latest release can always be downloaded from
136 <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox">ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox</a>.
138 <li> A new snapshot of the source is made daily and is available as a GNU
139 gzipped tarball <a href="busybox.tar.gz"> right here</a>.
141 <li> BusyBox now has its own publically browsable
142 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb/busybox/">CVS tree</a>,
144 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cvs_anon.html">CVS access</a>, and
145 for those that are actively contributing there is even
146 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cvs_write.html">CVS write access</a>.
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159 Current documentation for BusyBox includes:
161 <li> <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/BusyBox.html">BusyBox.html</a>.
162 This is a list of the all the available commands in BusyBox with
163 complete usage information and examples of how to use each app. I
164 have spent a <em>lot</em> of time updating these docs and trying to
165 make them fairly comprehensive. If you find any errors (factual,
166 grammatical, whatever) please let me know.
167 <li> <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/README">README</a>.
168 This is the README file included in the busybox source release.
169 <li> <a href="http://bugs.lineo.com/db/pa/lbusybox.html">BusyBox Bugs</a>.
170 Need to report a bug? Need to check if a bug has been filed?
171 <li> If you need more help, the BusyBox
172 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/lists/busybox/">mailing list</a> is
173 a good place to start.
177 <!-- Begin Links section -->
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186 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
190 <li> <A HREF="http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/">
191 Free Software from Bruce Perens</A><br>
192 The original idea for BusyBox, and all versions up to 0.26 were written
193 by <A HREF="mailto:bruce@perens.com">Bruce Perens</a>. This is his BusyBox website.
196 <li> <A HREF="http://freshmeat.net/projects/busybox/">
197 Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox</A>
199 <li><a href="http://tinylogin.lineo.com/">TinyLogin</a>
200 is a nice embedded tool for handling authentication, changing passwords,
201 and similar tasks which nicely complements BusyBox.
204 <li><a href="http://cvs.uclinux.org/uClibc.html">uClibc</a>
205 is a C library for embedded systems. You can actually statically link
206 a "Hello World" application under x86 that only takes 4k (as opposed to
207 200k under GNU libc). It can do dynamic linking too and works nicely with
208 BusyBox to create very small embedded systems.
211 <li> <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/software.html">Other cool embedded software</a>.
214 <li> <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/">opensource.lineo.com</a>.
217 <li> <A HREF="http://www.lineo.com/">Lineo</A> is sponsoring BusyBox development.
223 <!-- Begin Projects section -->
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226 <A NAME="projects"><BIG><B>
227 Products/Projects Using BusyBox
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232 <p> I know of the following products and/or projects that use BusyBox --
233 listed in the order I happen to add them to the web page:
236 <li> <a href="http://www.lineo.com/products/embedix_linux/">Lineo Embedix Linux</a>
237 <li> <a href="http://cvs.debian.org/boot-floppies/">Debian installer (boot floppies) project</a>
238 <li> <a href="http://www.linuxrouter.org/">Linux Router Project </a>
239 <li> <a href="http://linux-embedded.org/">LEM</a>
240 <li> <a href="http://www.toms.net/rb/">tomsrtbt</a>
241 <li> <a href="http://www.stormix.com/">Stormix Installer</a>
242 <li> <a href="http://www.emacinc.com/linux2_sbc.htm">EMAC Linux 2.0 SBC</a>
243 <li> <a href="http://www.trinux.org/">Trinux</a>
244 <li> <a href="http://oddas.sourceforge.net/">ODDAS project</a>
245 <li> <a href="http://www.kerbango.com/">The Kerbango Internet Radio</a>
246 <li> <a href="http://www.linuxmagic.com/vpn/">LinuxMagic VPN Firewall</a>
247 <li> <a href="http://byld.sourceforge.net/">Build Your Linux Disk</a>
248 <li> <a href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~ichi/baslinux.html">BasicLinux</a>
249 <li> <a href="http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/recovery">Zdisk</a>
250 <li> <a href="http://www.adtran.com">AdTran - VPN/firewall VPN Linux Distribution</a>
251 <li> <a href="http://mkcdrec.ota.be/">mkCDrec - make CD-ROM recovery</a>
252 <li> <a href="http://recycle.lbl.gov/~ldoolitt/bse/">Linux on nanoEngine</a>
253 <li> <a href="http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/"> Floppyfw</a>
255 <li> <a href="http://midori.transmeta.com/"> Midori Linux</a> - <a href=
256 "http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,42399,00.html"> Article on
257 Midori Linux</a> on <a href= "http://www.wired.com"> Wired</a>. Quote from
258 Erik at the top of <a href=
259 "http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,42399-2,00.html"> this
262 <li> <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">Linux Terminal Server Project</a>
263 <li> <a href="http://www.devil-linux.org/">Devil-Linux</a>
267 <p> Do you use BusyBox? I'd love to know about it and I'd be happy to link to
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284 <font size="-1" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">
285 Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to
286 <a href="mailto:andersen@lineo.com">Erik Andersen</a><BR>
287 The Busybox logo is copyright 1999,2000,2001, Erik Andersen.
292 <a href="http://www.vim.org"><img border=0 width=90 height=36
293 src="images/written.in.vi.png"
294 alt="This site created with the vi editor"></a>
298 <a href="http://www.gimp.org/"><img border=0 width=90 height=36
299 src="images/gfx_by_gimp.png" alt="Graphics by GIMP"></a>
303 <a href="http://www.linuxtoday.com"><img width=90 height=36
304 src="images/ltbutton2.png" alt="Linux Today"></a>
308 <p><a href="http://slashdot.org"><img width=90 height=36
309 src="images/sdsmall.png" alt="Slashdot"></a>
313 <a href="http://freshmeat.net"><img width=90 height=36
314 src="images/fm.mini.png" alt="Freshmeat"></a>