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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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28 <!-- Begin Older News section -->
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33 Older BusyBox News</A>
37 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
41 <p> <li> <b>Take me back to the <a href="http://busybox.net/">BusyBox</a> web site.</b>
45 <li> <b>18 November 2001 -- Help us buy busybox.net!</b>
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61 I've contacted the current owner of busybox.net and he is willing
62 to sell the domain name -- for $250. He also owns busybox.org but
63 will not part with it... I will then need to pay the registry fee
64 for a couple of years and start paying for bandwidth, so this will
65 initially cost about $300. I would like to host busybox.net on my
66 home machine (codepoet.org) so I have full control over the system,
67 but to do that would require that I increase the level of bandwidth
68 I am paying for. Did you know that so far this month, there
69 have been over 1.4 Gigabytes of busybox ftp downloads? I don't
70 even <em>know</em> how much CVS bandwidth it requires. For the
71 time being, Lineo has continued to graciously provide this
72 bandwidth, despite the fact that I no longer work for them. If I
73 start running this all on my home machine, paying for the needed bandwidth
74 will start costing some money.
77 I was going to pay it all myself, but my wife didn't like that
78 idea at all (big surprise). It turns out <insert argument
79 where she wins and I don't> she has better ideas
80 about what we should spend our money on that don't involve
81 busybox. She suggested I should ask for contributions on the
82 mailing list and web page. So...
85 I am hoping that if everyone could contribute a bit, we could pick
86 up the busybox.net domain name and cover the bandwidth costs. I
87 know that busybox is being used by a lot of companies as well as
88 individuals -- hopefully people and companies that are willing to
89 contribute back a bit. So if everyone could please help out, that
94 <li> <b>23 August 2001 -- BusyBox 0.60.1 released</b>
97 This is a relatively minor bug fixing release that fixes
98 up the bugs that have shown up in the stable release in
99 the last few weeks. Fortunately, nothing <em>too</em>
100 serious has shown up. This release only fixes bugs -- no
101 new features, no new applets. So without further ado,
102 here it is. Come and get it.
105 <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a> has all
106 the details. As usual BusyBox 0.60.1 can be downloaded from
107 <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads">http://busybox.net/downloads</a>.
112 <li> <b>2 August 2001 -- BusyBox 0.60.0 released</b>
114 I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of
115 BusyBox 0.60.0. I have personally tested this release with libc5, glibc,
116 and <a href="http://uclibc.org/">uClibc</a> on
117 x86, ARM, and powerpc using linux 2.2 and 2.4, and I know a number
118 of people using it on everything from ia64 to m68k with great success.
119 Everything seems to be working very nicely now, so getting a nice
120 stable bug-free(tm) release out seems to be in order. This releases fixes
121 a memory leak in syslogd, a number of bugs in the ash and msh shells, and
122 cleans up a number of things.
126 Those wanting an easy way to test the 0.60.0 release with uClibc can
127 use <a href="http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/">User-Mode Linux</a>
128 to give it a try by downloading and compiling
129 <a href="ftp://busybox.net/buildroot.tar.gz">buildroot.tar.gz</a>.
130 You don't have to be root or reboot your machine to run test this way.
131 Preconfigured User-Mode Linux kernel source is also on busybox.net.
133 Another cool thing is the nifty <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/tutorial/index.html">
134 BusyBox Tutorial</a> contributed by K Computing. This requires
135 a ShockWave plugin (or standalone viewer), so you may want to grab the
136 the GPLed shockwave viewer from <a href="http://www.swift-tools.com/Flash/flash-0.4.10.tgz">here</a>
137 to view the tutorial.
140 Finally, In case you didn't notice anything odd about the
141 version number of this release, let me point out that this release
142 is <em>not</em> 0.53, because I bumped the version number up a
143 bit. This reflects the fact that this release is intended to form
144 a new stable BusyBox release series. If you need to rely on a
145 stable version of BusyBox, you should plan on using the stable
146 0.60.x series. If bugs show up then I will release 0.60.1, then
147 0.60.2, etc... This is also intended to deal with the fact that
148 the BusyBox build system will be getting a major overhaul for the
149 next release and I don't want that to break products that people
150 are shipping. To avoid that, the new build system will be
151 released as part of a new BusyBox development series that will
152 have some not-yet-decided-on odd version number. Once things
153 stabilize and the new build system is working for everyone, then
154 I will release that as a new stable release series.
158 <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a> has all
159 the details. As usual BusyBox 0.60.0 can be downloaded from
160 <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads">http://busybox.net/downloads</a>.
165 <li> <b>7 July 2001 -- BusyBox 0.52 released</b>
168 I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of
169 BusyBox 0.52 (the "new-and-improved rock-solid release"). This
170 release is the result of <em>many</em> hours of work and has tons
171 of bugfixes, optimizations, and cleanups. This release adds
172 several new applets, including several new shells (such as hush, msh,
177 <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a> covers
178 some of the more obvious details, but there are many many things that
179 are not mentioned, but have been improved in subtle ways. As usual,
180 BusyBox 0.52 can be downloaded from
181 <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads">http://busybox.net/downloads</a>.
186 <li> <b>10 April 2001 - Graph of Busybox Growth </b>
188 The illustrious Larry Doolittle has made a PostScript chart of the growth
189 of the Busybox tarball size over time. It is available for downloading /
190 viewing <a href= "busybox-growth.ps"> right here</a>.
192 <p> (Note that while the number of applets in Busybox has increased, you
193 can still configure Busybox to be as small as you want by selectively
194 turning off whichever applets you don't need.)
198 <li> <b>10 April 2001 -- BusyBox 0.51 released</b>
201 BusyBox 0.51 (the "rock-solid release") is now out there. This
202 release adds only 2 new applets: env and vi. The vi applet,
203 contributed by Sterling Huxley, is very functional, and is only
204 22k. This release fixes 3 critical bugs in the 0.50 release.
205 There were 2 potential segfaults in lash (the busybox shell) in
206 the 0.50 release which are now fixed. Another critical bug in
207 0.50 which is now fixed: syslogd from 0.50 could potentially
208 deadlock the init process and thereby break your entire system.
211 There are a number of improvements in this release as well. For
212 one thing, the wget applet is greatly improved. Dmitry Zakharov
213 added FTP support, and Laurence Anderson make wget fully RFC
214 compliant for HTTP 1.1. The mechanism for including utility
215 functions in previous releases was clumsy and error prone. Now
216 all utility functions are part of a new libbb library, which makes
217 maintaining utility functions much simpler. And BusyBox now
218 compiles on itanium systems (thanks to the Debian itanium porters
219 for letting me use their system!).
222 <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a> for
223 complete details. BusyBox 0.51 can be downloaded from
224 <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads">http://busybox.net/downloads</a>.
228 <li> <b>Busybox Boot-Floppy Image</b>
230 <p>Because you asked for it, we have made available a <a href=
231 "http://busybox.net/downloads/busybox.floppy.img"> Busybox boot floppy
232 image</a>. Here's how you use it:
236 <li> <a href= "http://busybox.net/downloads/busybox.floppy.img">
237 Download the image</a>
239 <li> dd it onto a floppy like so: <tt> dd if=busybox.floppy.img
240 of=/dev/fd0 ; sync </tt>
242 <li> Pop it in a machine and boot up.
246 <p> If you want to look at the contents of the initrd image, do this:
249 mount ./busybox.floppy.img /mnt -o loop -t msdos
250 cp /mnt/initrd.gz /tmp
252 gunzip /tmp/initrd.gz
253 mount /tmp/initrd /mnt -o loop -t minix
257 <li> <b>15 March 2001 -- BusyBox 0.50 released</b>
260 This release adds several new applets including ifconfig, route, pivot_root, stty,
261 and tftp, and also fixes tons of bugs. Tab completion in the
262 shell is now working very well, and the shell's environment variable
263 expansion was fixed. Tons of other things were fixed or made
264 smaller. For a fairly complete overview, see the
265 <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a>.
267 lash (the busybox shell) is still with us, fixed up a bit so it
268 now behaves itself quite nicely. It really is quite usable as
269 long as you don't expect it to provide Bourne shell grammer.
270 Standard things like pipes, redirects, command line editing, and
271 environment variable expansion work great. But we have found that
272 this shell, while very usable, does not provide an extensible
273 framework for adding in full Bourne shell behavior. So the first order of
274 business as we begin working on the next BusyBox release will be to merge in the new shell
275 currently in progress at
276 <a href="http://doolittle.faludi.com/~larry/parser.html">Larry Doolittle's website</a>.
280 <li> <b>27 January 2001 -- BusyBox 0.49 released</b>
283 Several new applets, lots of bug fixes, cleanups, and many smaller
284 things made nicer. Several cleanups and improvements to the shell.
285 For a list of the most interesting changes
286 you might want to look at the <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a>.
288 Special thanks go out to Matt Kraai and Larry Doolittle for all their
289 work on this release, and for keeping on top of things while I've been
292 <em>Special Note</em><br>
294 BusyBox 0.49 was supposed to have replaced lash, the BusyBox
295 shell, with a new shell that understands full Bourne shell/Posix shell grammer.
296 Well, that simply didn't happen in time for this release. A new
297 shell that will eventually replace lash is already under
298 construction. This new shell is being developed by Larry
299 Doolittle, and could use all of our help. Please see the work in
300 progress on <a href="http://doolittle.faludi.com/~larry/parser.html">Larry's website</a>
301 and help out if you can. This shell will be included in the next
305 <li> <b>13 December 2000 -- BusyBox 0.48 released</b>
308 This release fixes lots and lots of bugs. This has had some very
309 rigorous testing, and looks very, very clean. The usual tar
310 update of course: tar no longer breaks hardlinks, tar -xzf is
311 optionally supported, and the LRP folks will be pleased to know
312 that 'tar -X' and 'tar --exclude' are both now in. Applets are
313 now looked up using a binary search making lash (the busybox
314 shell) much faster. For the new debian-installer (for Debian
315 woody) a .udeb can now be generated.
317 The curious can get a list of some of the more interesting changes by reading
318 the <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a>.
320 Many thanks go out to the many many people that have contributed to
321 this release, especially Matt Kraai, Larry Doolittle, and Kent Robotti.
323 <p> <li> <b>26 September 2000 -- BusyBox 0.47 released</b>
326 This release fixes lots of bugs (including an ugly bug in 0.46
327 syslogd that could fork-bomb your system). Added several new
328 apps: rdate, wget, getopt, dos2unix, unix2dos, reset, unrpm,
329 renice, xargs, and expr. syslogd now supports network logging.
330 There are the usual tar updates. Most apps now use getopt for
331 more correct option parsing.
332 See the <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a>
333 for complete details.
336 <p> <li> <b>11 July 2000 -- BusyBox 0.46 released</b>
339 This release fixes several bugs (including a ugly bug in tar,
340 and fixes for NFSv3 mount support). Added a dumpkmap to allow
341 people to dump a binary keymaps for use with 'loadkmap', and a
342 completely reworked 'grep' and 'sed' which should behave better.
343 BusyBox shell can now also be used as a login shell.
344 See the <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a>
345 for complete details.
348 <p> <li> <b>21 June 2000 -- BusyBox 0.45 released</b>
351 This release has been slow in coming, but is very solid at this
352 point. BusyBox now supports libc5 as well as GNU libc. This
353 release provides the following new apps: cut, tr, insmod, ar,
354 mktemp, setkeycodes, md5sum, uuencode, uudecode, which, and
355 telnet. There are bug fixes for just about every app as well (see
356 the <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a> for
359 Also, some exciting infrastructure news! Busybox now has its own
360 <a href="http://busybox.net/lists/busybox/">mailing list</a>,
362 <a href="http://busybox.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb/busybox/">CVS tree</a>,
364 <a href="http://busybox.net/cvs_anon.html">CVS access</a>, and
365 for those that are actively contributing there is even
366 <a href="http://busybox.net/cvs_write.html">CVS write access</a>.
367 I think this will be a huge help to the ongoing development of BusyBox.
369 Also, for the curious, there is no 0.44 release. Somehow 0.44 got announced
370 a few weeks ago prior to its actually being released. To avoid any confusion
371 we are just skipping 0.44.
373 Many thanks go out to the many people that have contributed to this release
374 of BusyBox (esp. Pavel Roskin)!
377 <p> <li> <b>19 April 2000 -- syslogd bugfix</b>
379 Turns out that there was still a bug in busybox syslogd.
380 For example, with the following test app:
382 #include <syslog.h>
384 int do_log(char* msg, int delay)
386 openlog("testlog", LOG_PID, LOG_DAEMON);
388 syslog(LOG_ERR, "%s: testing one, two, three\n", msg);
402 it should be logging stuff from both "A" and "B". As released in 0.43 only stuff
403 from "A" would have been logged. This means that if init tries to log something
404 while say ppp has the syslog open, init would block (which is bad, bad, bad).
406 Karl M. Hegbloom has created a
407 <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/busybox-0.43-syslog_patch">fix for the problem</a>.
411 <p> <li> <b>18 April 2000 -- BusyBox 0.43 released (finally!)</b>
413 I have finally gotten everything into a state where I feel pretty
414 good about things. This is definitely the most stable, solid release
415 so far. A lot of bugs have been fixed, and the following new apps
416 have been added: sh, basename, dirname, killall, uptime,
417 freeramdisk, tr, echo, test, and usleep. Tar has been completely
418 rewritten from scratch. Bss size has also been greatly reduced.
419 More details are available in the
420 <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
421 Oh, and as a special bonus, I wrote some fairly comprehensive
422 <em>documentation</em>, complete with examples and full usage information.
425 Many thanks go out to the fine people that have helped by submitting patches
426 and bug reports; particularly instrumental in helping for this release were
427 Karl Hegbloom, Pavel Roskin, Friedrich Vedder, Emanuele Caratti,
428 Bob Tinsley, Nicolas Pitre, Avery Pennarun, Arne Bernin, John Beppu, and Jim Gleason.
429 There were others so if I somehow forgot to mention you, I'm very sorry.
432 You can grab BusyBox 0.43 tarballs <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/">here</a>.
434 <p> <li> <b>9 April 2000 -- BusyBox 0.43 pre release</b>
436 Unfortunately, I have not yet finished all the things I want to
437 do for BusyBox 0.43, so I am posting this pre-release for people
438 to poke at. This contains my complete rewrite of tar, which now weighs in at
439 5k (7k with all options turned on) and works for reading and writing
440 tarballs (which it does correctly for everything I have been able to throw
441 at it). Tar also (optionally) supports the "--exclude" option (mainly because
442 the Linux Router Project folks asked for it). This also has a pre-release
443 of the micro shell I have been writing. This pre-release should be stable
444 enough for production use -- it just isn't a release since I have some structural
445 changes I still want to make.
447 The pre-release can be found <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/">here</a>.
448 Please let me know ASAP if you find <em>any</em> bugs.
450 <p> <li> <b>28 March 2000 -- Andersen Baby Boy release</b>
452 I am pleased to announce that on Tuesday March 28th at 5:48pm, weighing in at 7
453 lbs. 12 oz, Micah Erik Andersen was born at LDS Hospital here in Salt Lake City.
454 He was born in the emergency room less then 5 minutes after we arrived -- and
455 it was such a relief that we even made it to the hospital at all. Despite the
456 fact that I was driving at an amazingly unlawful speed and honking at everybody
457 and thinking decidedly unkind thoughts about the people in our way, my wife
458 (inconsiderate of my feelings and complete lack of medical training) was lying
459 down in the back seat saying things like "I think I need to start pushing now"
460 (which she then proceeded to do despite my best encouraging statements to the
463 Anyway, I'm glad to note that despite the much-faster-than-we-were-expecting
464 labor, both Shaunalei and our new baby boy are doing wonderfully.
466 So now that I am done with my excuse for the slow release cycle...
467 Progress on the next release of BusyBox has been slow but steady. I expect
468 to have a release sometime during the first week of April. This release will
469 include a number of important changes, including the addition of a shell, a
470 re-write of tar (to accommodate the Linux Router Project), and syslogd can now
471 accept multiple concurrent connections, fixing lots of unexpected blocking
475 <p> <li> <b>11 February 2000 -- BusyBox 0.42 released</b>
478 This is the most solid BusyBox release so far. Many, many
479 bugs have been fixed. See the
480 <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a> for details.
482 Of particular interest, init will now cleanly unmount
483 filesystems on reboot, cp and mv have been rewritten and
484 behave much better, and mount and umount no longer leak
485 loop devices. Many thanks go out to Randolph Chung,
486 Karl M. Hegbloom, Taketoshi Sano, and Pavel Roskin for
487 their hard work on this release of BusyBox. Please pound
488 on it and let me know if you find any bugs.
490 <p> <li> <b>19 January 2000 -- BusyBox 0.41 released</b>
493 This release includes bugfixes to cp, mv, logger, true, false,
494 mkdir, syslogd, and init. New apps include wc, hostid,
495 logname, tty, whoami, and yes. New features include loop device
496 support in mount and umount, and better TERM handling by init.
497 The changelog can be found <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
499 <p> <li> <b>7 January 2000 -- BusyBox 0.40 released</b>
502 This release includes bugfixes to init (now includes inittab support),
503 syslogd, head, logger, du, grep, cp, mv, sed, dmesg, ls, kill, gunzip, and mknod.
504 New apps include sort, uniq, lsmod, rmmod, fbset, and loadacm.
505 In particular, this release fixes an important bug in tar which
506 in some cases produced serious security problems.
507 As always, the changelog can be found <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
509 <p> <li> <b>11 December 1999 -- BusyBox Website</b>
511 I have received permission from Bruce Perens (the original author of BusyBox)
512 to set up this site as the new primary website for BusyBox. This website
513 will always contain pointers to the latest and greatest, and will also
514 contain the latest documentation on how to use BusyBox, what it can do,
515 what arguments its apps support, etc.
517 <p> <li> <b>10 December 1999 -- BusyBox 0.39 released</b>
519 This release includes fixes to init, reboot, halt, kill, and ls, and contains
520 the new apps ping, hostname, mkfifo, free, tail, du, tee, and head. A full
521 changelog can be found <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
522 <p> <li> <b>5 December 1999 -- BusyBox 0.38 released</b>
524 This release includes fixes to tar, cat, ls, dd, rm, umount, find, df,
525 and make install, and includes new apps syslogd/klogd and logger.
529 <!-- Begin Links section -->
531 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
538 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
542 <li> <a href="http://busybox.net/">Take me back to http://busybox.net/</a>.
545 <li> <A HREF="http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/">
546 Free Software from Bruce Perens</A><br>
547 The original idea for BusyBox, and all versions up to 0.26 were written
548 by <A HREF="mailto:bruce@perens.com">Bruce Perens</a>. This is his BusyBox website.
551 <li> <A HREF="http://freshmeat.net/appindex/1999/04/11/923859921.html">
552 Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox</A>
555 <li> <a href="http://busybox.net/software.html">Cool embedded software</a>.
561 <!-- End of Table -->
574 <font size="-1" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">
575 Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to
576 <a href="mailto:andersen@codepoet.org">Erik Andersen</a><BR>
577 The Busybox logo is copyright 1999,2000,2001 Erik Andersen.
582 <a href="http://www.vim.org"><img border=0 width=88 height=32
583 src="images/anim.written.in.vi.gif"
584 alt="This site created with the vi editor"></a>
588 <a href="http://www.gimp.org/"><img border=0 width=88 height=38
589 src="images/gfx_by_gimp.gif" alt="Graphics by GIMP"></a>
593 <a href="http://www.linuxtoday.com"><img width=90 height=36
594 src="images/ltbutton2.jpg" alt="Linux Today"></a>
598 <p><a href="http://slashdot.org"><img width=90 height=36
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604 src="images/fm.mini.jpg" alt="Freshmeat"></a>