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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 -->
74 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
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 hust, 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
176 <li> <b>15 March 2001 -- BusyBox 0.50 released</b>
179 This release adds several new applets including ifconfig, route, pivot_root, stty,
180 and tftp, and also fixes tons of bugs. Tab completion in the
181 shell is now working very well, and the shell's environment variable
182 expansion was fixed. Tons of other things were fixed or made
183 smaller. For a fairly complete overview, see the
184 <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
186 lash (the busybox shell) is still with us, fixed up a bit so it
187 now behaves itself quite nicely. It really is quite usable as
188 long as you don't expect it to provide Bourne shell grammer.
189 Standard things like pipes, redirects, command line editing, and
190 environment variable expansion work great. But we have found that
191 this shell, while very usable, does not provide an extensible
192 framework for adding in full Bourne shell behavior. So the first order of
193 business as we begin working on the next BusyBox release will be to merge in the new shell
194 currently in progress at
195 <a href="http://doolittle.faludi.com/~larry/parser.html">Larry Doolittle's website</a>.
199 <li> <b>27 January 2001 -- BusyBox 0.49 released</b>
202 Several new applets, lots of bug fixes, cleanups, and many smaller
203 things made nicer. Several cleanups and improvements to the shell.
204 For a list of the most interesting changes
205 you might want to look at the <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
207 Special thanks go out to Matt Kraai and Larry Doolittle for all their
208 work on this release, and for keeping on top of things while I've been
211 <em>Special Note</em><br>
213 BusyBox 0.49 was supposed to have replaced lash, the BusyBox
214 shell, with a new shell that understands full Bourne shell/Posix shell grammer.
215 Well, that simply didn't happen in time for this release. A new
216 shell that will eventually replace lash is already under
217 construction. This new shell is being developed by Larry
218 Doolittle, and could use all of our help. Please see the work in
219 progress on <a href="http://doolittle.faludi.com/~larry/parser.html">Larry's website</a>
220 and help out if you can. This shell will be included in the next
224 <li> <b>13 December 2000 -- BusyBox 0.48 released</b>
227 This release fixes lots and lots of bugs. This has had some very
228 rigorous testing, and looks very, very clean. The usual tar
229 update of course: tar no longer breaks hardlinks, tar -xzf is
230 optionally supported, and the LRP folks will be pleased to know
231 that 'tar -X' and 'tar --exclude' are both now in. Applets are
232 now looked up using a binary search making lash (the busybox
233 shell) much faster. For the new debian-installer (for Debian
234 woody) a .udeb can now be generated.
236 The curious can get a list of some of the more interesting changes by reading
237 the <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
239 Many thanks go out to the many many people that have contributed to
240 this release, especially Matt Kraai, Larry Doolittle, and Kent Robotti.
246 For the old news, visit <a href="http://busybox.lineo.com/oldnews.html">the old news page</a>.
250 <!-- Begin Download section -->
252 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
253 <A NAME="download"><BIG><B>
257 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
260 <li> Source for the latest release can always be downloaded from
261 <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox">ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox</a>.
263 <li> A new snapshot of the source is made daily and is available as a GNU
264 gzipped tarball <a href="busybox.tar.gz"> right here</a>.
266 <li> BusyBox now has its own publically browsable
267 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb/busybox/">CVS tree</a>,
269 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cvs_anon.html">CVS access</a>, and
270 for those that are actively contributing there is even
271 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cvs_write.html">CVS write access</a>.
276 <!-- Begin Docs section -->
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279 <A NAME="docs"><BIG><B>
283 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
284 Current documentation for BusyBox includes:
286 <li> <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/BusyBox.html">BusyBox.html</a>.
287 This is a list of the all the available commands in BusyBox with
288 complete usage information and examples of how to use each app. I
289 have spent a <em>lot</em> of time updating these docs and trying to
290 make them fairly comprehensive. If you find any errors (factual,
291 grammatical, whatever) please let me know.
292 <li> <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/README">README</a>.
293 This is the README file included in the busybox source release.
294 <li> <a href="http://bugs.lineo.com/db/pa/lbusybox.html">BusyBox Bugs</a>.
295 Need to report a bug? Need to check if a bug has been filed?
296 <li> If you need more help, the BusyBox
297 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/lists/busybox/">mailing list</a> is
298 a good place to start.
302 <!-- Begin Links section -->
304 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
311 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
315 <li> <A HREF="http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/">
316 Free Software from Bruce Perens</A><br>
317 The original idea for BusyBox, and all versions up to 0.26 were written
318 by <A HREF="mailto:bruce@perens.com">Bruce Perens</a>. This is his BusyBox website.
321 <li> <A HREF="http://freshmeat.net/projects/busybox/">
322 Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox</A>
324 <li><a href="http://tinylogin.lineo.com/">TinyLogin</a>
325 is a nice embedded tool for handling authentication, changing passwords,
326 and similar tasks which nicely complements BusyBox.
329 <li><a href="http://cvs.uclinux.org/uClibc.html">uClibc</a>
330 is a C library for embedded systems. You can actually statically link
331 a "Hello World" application under x86 that only takes 4k (as opposed to
332 200k under GNU libc). It can do dynamic linking too and works nicely with
333 BusyBox to create very small embedded systems.
336 <li> <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/software.html">Other cool embedded software</a>.
339 <li> <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/">opensource.lineo.com</a>.
342 <li> <A HREF="http://www.lineo.com/">Lineo</A> is sponsoring BusyBox development.
348 <!-- Begin Projects section -->
350 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
351 <A NAME="projects"><BIG><B>
352 Products/Projects Using BusyBox
355 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
357 <p> I know of the following products and/or projects that use BusyBox --
358 listed in the order I happen to add them to the web page:
361 <li> <a href="http://www.lineo.com/products/embedix_linux/">Lineo Embedix Linux</a>
362 <li> <a href="http://cvs.debian.org/boot-floppies/">Debian installer (boot floppies) project</a>
363 <li> <a href="http://www.linuxrouter.org/">Linux Router Project </a>
364 <li> <a href="http://linux-embedded.org/">LEM</a>
365 <li> <a href="http://www.toms.net/rb/">tomsrtbt</a>
366 <li> <a href="http://www.stormix.com/">Stormix Installer</a>
367 <li> <a href="http://www.emacinc.com/linux2_sbc.htm">EMAC Linux 2.0 SBC</a>
368 <li> <a href="http://www.trinux.org/">Trinux</a>
369 <li> <a href="http://oddas.sourceforge.net/">ODDAS project</a>
370 <li> <a href="http://www.kerbango.com/">The Kerbango Internet Radio</a>
371 <li> <a href="http://www.linuxmagic.com/vpn/">LinuxMagic VPN Firewall</a>
372 <li> <a href="http://byld.sourceforge.net/">Build Your Linux Disk</a>
373 <li> <a href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~ichi/baslinux.html">BasicLinux</a>
374 <li> <a href="http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/recovery">Zdisk</a>
375 <li> <a href="http://www.adtran.com">AdTran - VPN/firewall VPN Linux Distribution</a>
376 <li> <a href="http://mkcdrec.ota.be/">mkCDrec - make CD-ROM recovery</a>
377 <li> <a href="http://recycle.lbl.gov/~ldoolitt/bse/">Linux on nanoEngine</a>
378 <li> <a href="http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/"> Floppyfw</a>
380 <li> <a href="http://midori.transmeta.com/"> Midori Linux</a> - <a href=
381 "http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,42399,00.html"> Article on
382 Midori Linux</a> on <a href= "http://www.wired.com"> Wired</a>. Quote from
383 Erik at the top of <a href=
384 "http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,42399-2,00.html"> this
387 <li> <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">Linux Terminal Server Project</a>
388 <li> <a href="http://www.devil-linux.org/">Devil-Linux</a>
392 <p> Do you use BusyBox? I'd love to know about it and I'd be happy to link to
397 <!-- End of Table -->
409 <font size="-1" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">
410 Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to
411 <a href="mailto:andersen@lineo.com">Erik Andersen</a><BR>
412 The Busybox logo is copyright 1999,2000,2001, Erik Andersen.
417 <a href="http://www.vim.org"><img border=0 width=90 height=36
418 src="images/written.in.vi.png"
419 alt="This site created with the vi editor"></a>
423 <a href="http://www.gimp.org/"><img border=0 width=90 height=36
424 src="images/gfx_by_gimp.png" alt="Graphics by GIMP"></a>
428 <a href="http://www.linuxtoday.com"><img width=90 height=36
429 src="images/ltbutton2.png" alt="Linux Today"></a>
433 <p><a href="http://slashdot.org"><img width=90 height=36
434 src="images/sdsmall.png" alt="Slashdot"></a>
438 <a href="http://freshmeat.net"><img width=90 height=36
439 src="images/fm.mini.png" alt="Freshmeat"></a>