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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 -->
30 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
33 Older BusyBox News</A>
37 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
41 <p> <li> <b>Take me back to the <a href="http://busybox.lineo.com/">BusyBox</a> web site.</b>
44 <li> <b>15 March 2001 -- BusyBox 0.50 released</b>
47 This release adds several new applets including ifconfig, route, pivot_root, stty,
48 and tftp, and also fixes tons of bugs. Tab completion in the
49 shell is now working very well, and the shell's environment variable
50 expansion was fixed. Tons of other things were fixed or made
51 smaller. For a fairly complete overview, see the
52 <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
54 lash (the busybox shell) is still with us, fixed up a bit so it
55 now behaves itself quite nicely. It really is quite usable as
56 long as you don't expect it to provide Bourne shell grammer.
57 Standard things like pipes, redirects, command line editing, and
58 environment variable expansion work great. But we have found that
59 this shell, while very usable, does not provide an extensible
60 framework for adding in full Bourne shell behavior. So the first order of
61 business as we begin working on the next BusyBox release will be to merge in the new shell
62 currently in progress at
63 <a href="http://doolittle.faludi.com/~larry/parser.html">Larry Doolittle's website</a>.
67 <li> <b>27 January 2001 -- BusyBox 0.49 released</b>
70 Several new applets, lots of bug fixes, cleanups, and many smaller
71 things made nicer. Several cleanups and improvements to the shell.
72 For a list of the most interesting changes
73 you might want to look at the <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
75 Special thanks go out to Matt Kraai and Larry Doolittle for all their
76 work on this release, and for keeping on top of things while I've been
79 <em>Special Note</em><br>
81 BusyBox 0.49 was supposed to have replaced lash, the BusyBox
82 shell, with a new shell that understands full Bourne shell/Posix shell grammer.
83 Well, that simply didn't happen in time for this release. A new
84 shell that will eventually replace lash is already under
85 construction. This new shell is being developed by Larry
86 Doolittle, and could use all of our help. Please see the work in
87 progress on <a href="http://doolittle.faludi.com/~larry/parser.html">Larry's website</a>
88 and help out if you can. This shell will be included in the next
92 <li> <b>13 December 2000 -- BusyBox 0.48 released</b>
95 This release fixes lots and lots of bugs. This has had some very
96 rigorous testing, and looks very, very clean. The usual tar
97 update of course: tar no longer breaks hardlinks, tar -xzf is
98 optionally supported, and the LRP folks will be pleased to know
99 that 'tar -X' and 'tar --exclude' are both now in. Applets are
100 now looked up using a binary search making lash (the busybox
101 shell) much faster. For the new debian-installer (for Debian
102 woody) a .udeb can now be generated.
104 The curious can get a list of some of the more interesting changes by reading
105 the <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
107 Many thanks go out to the many many people that have contributed to
108 this release, especially Matt Kraai, Larry Doolittle, and Kent Robotti.
110 <p> <li> <b>26 September 2000 -- BusyBox 0.47 released</b>
113 This release fixes lots of bugs (including an ugly bug in 0.46
114 syslogd that could fork-bomb your system). Added several new
115 apps: rdate, wget, getopt, dos2unix, unix2dos, reset, unrpm,
116 renice, xargs, and expr. syslogd now supports network logging.
117 There are the usual tar updates. Most apps now use getopt for
118 more correct option parsing.
119 See the <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>
120 for complete details.
123 <p> <li> <b>11 July 2000 -- BusyBox 0.46 released</b>
126 This release fixes several bugs (including a ugly bug in tar,
127 and fixes for NFSv3 mount support). Added a dumpkmap to allow
128 people to dump a binary keymaps for use with 'loadkmap', and a
129 completely reworked 'grep' and 'sed' which should behave better.
130 BusyBox shell can now also be used as a login shell.
131 See the <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>
132 for complete details.
135 <p> <li> <b>21 June 2000 -- BusyBox 0.45 released</b>
138 This release has been slow in coming, but is very solid at this
139 point. BusyBox now supports libc5 as well as GNU libc. This
140 release provides the following new apps: cut, tr, insmod, ar,
141 mktemp, setkeycodes, md5sum, uuencode, uudecode, which, and
142 telnet. There are bug fixes for just about every app as well (see
143 the <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a> for
146 Also, some exciting infrastructure news! Busybox now has its own
147 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/lists/busybox/">mailing list</a>,
149 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb/busybox/">CVS tree</a>,
151 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cvs_anon.html">CVS access</a>, and
152 for those that are actively contributing there is even
153 <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cvs_write.html">CVS write access</a>.
154 I think this will be a huge help to the ongoing development of BusyBox.
156 Also, for the curious, there is no 0.44 release. Somehow 0.44 got announced
157 a few weeks ago prior to its actually being released. To avoid any confusion
158 we are just skipping 0.44.
160 Many thanks go out to the many people that have contributed to this release
161 of BusyBox (esp. Pavel Roskin)!
164 <p> <li> <b>19 April 2000 -- syslogd bugfix</b>
166 Turns out that there was still a bug in busybox syslogd.
167 For example, with the following test app:
169 #include <syslog.h>
171 int do_log(char* msg, int delay)
173 openlog("testlog", LOG_PID, LOG_DAEMON);
175 syslog(LOG_ERR, "%s: testing one, two, three\n", msg);
189 it should be logging stuff from both "A" and "B". As released in 0.43 only stuff
190 from "A" would have been logged. This means that if init tries to log something
191 while say ppp has the syslog open, init would block (which is bad, bad, bad).
193 Karl M. Hegbloom has created a
194 <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/busybox-0.43-syslog_patch">fix for the problem</a>.
198 <p> <li> <b>18 April 2000 -- BusyBox 0.43 released (finally!)</b>
200 I have finally gotten everything into a state where I feel pretty
201 good about things. This is definitely the most stable, solid release
202 so far. A lot of bugs have been fixed, and the following new apps
203 have been added: sh, basename, dirname, killall, uptime,
204 freeramdisk, tr, echo, test, and usleep. Tar has been completely
205 rewritten from scratch. Bss size has also been greatly reduced.
206 More details are available in the
207 <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
208 Oh, and as a special bonus, I wrote some fairly comprehensive
209 <em>documentation</em>, complete with examples and full usage information.
212 Many thanks go out to the fine people that have helped by submitting patches
213 and bug reports; particularly instrumental in helping for this release were
214 Karl Hegbloom, Pavel Roskin, Friedrich Vedder, Emanuele Caratti,
215 Bob Tinsley, Nicolas Pitre, Avery Pennarun, Arne Bernin, John Beppu, and Jim Gleason.
216 There were others so if I somehow forgot to mention you, I'm very sorry.
219 You can grab BusyBox 0.43 tarballs <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/">here</a>.
221 <p> <li> <b>9 April 2000 -- BusyBox 0.43 pre release</b>
223 Unfortunately, I have not yet finished all the things I want to
224 do for BusyBox 0.43, so I am posting this pre-release for people
225 to poke at. This contains my complete rewrite of tar, which now weighs in at
226 5k (7k with all options turned on) and works for reading and writing
227 tarballs (which it does correctly for everything I have been able to throw
228 at it). Tar also (optionally) supports the "--exclude" option (mainly because
229 the Linux Router Project folks asked for it). This also has a pre-release
230 of the micro shell I have been writing. This pre-release should be stable
231 enough for production use -- it just isn't a release since I have some structural
232 changes I still want to make.
234 The pre-release can be found <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/">here</a>.
235 Please let me know ASAP if you find <em>any</em> bugs.
237 <p> <li> <b>28 March 2000 -- Andersen Baby Boy release</b>
239 I am pleased to announce that on Tuesday March 28th at 5:48pm, weighing in at 7
240 lbs. 12 oz, Micah Erik Andersen was born at LDS Hospital here in Salt Lake City.
241 He was born in the emergency room less then 5 minutes after we arrived -- and
242 it was such a relief that we even made it to the hospital at all. Despite the
243 fact that I was driving at an amazingly unlawful speed and honking at everybody
244 and thinking decidedly unkind thoughts about the people in our way, my wife
245 (inconsiderate of my feelings and complete lack of medical training) was lying
246 down in the back seat saying things like "I think I need to start pushing now"
247 (which she then proceeded to do despite my best encouraging statements to the
250 Anyway, I'm glad to note that despite the much-faster-than-we-were-expecting
251 labor, both Shaunalei and our new baby boy are doing wonderfully.
253 So now that I am done with my excuse for the slow release cycle...
254 Progress on the next release of BusyBox has been slow but steady. I expect
255 to have a release sometime during the first week of April. This release will
256 include a number of important changes, including the addition of a shell, a
257 re-write of tar (to accommodate the Linux Router Project), and syslogd can now
258 accept multiple concurrent connections, fixing lots of unexpected blocking
262 <p> <li> <b>11 February 2000 -- BusyBox 0.42 released</b>
265 This is the most solid BusyBox release so far. Many, many
266 bugs have been fixed. See the
267 <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a> for details.
269 Of particular interest, init will now cleanly unmount
270 filesystems on reboot, cp and mv have been rewritten and
271 behave much better, and mount and umount no longer leak
272 loop devices. Many thanks go out to Randolph Chung,
273 Karl M. Hegbloom, Taketoshi Sano, and Pavel Roskin for
274 their hard work on this release of BusyBox. Please pound
275 on it and let me know if you find any bugs.
277 <p> <li> <b>19 January 2000 -- BusyBox 0.41 released</b>
280 This release includes bugfixes to cp, mv, logger, true, false,
281 mkdir, syslogd, and init. New apps include wc, hostid,
282 logname, tty, whoami, and yes. New features include loop device
283 support in mount and umount, and better TERM handling by init.
284 The changelog can be found <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
286 <p> <li> <b>7 January 2000 -- BusyBox 0.40 released</b>
289 This release includes bugfixes to init (now includes inittab support),
290 syslogd, head, logger, du, grep, cp, mv, sed, dmesg, ls, kill, gunzip, and mknod.
291 New apps include sort, uniq, lsmod, rmmod, fbset, and loadacm.
292 In particular, this release fixes an important bug in tar which
293 in some cases produced serious security problems.
294 As always, the changelog can be found <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
296 <p> <li> <b>11 December 1999 -- BusyBox Website</b>
298 I have received permission from Bruce Perens (the original author of BusyBox)
299 to set up this site as the new primary website for BusyBox. This website
300 will always contain pointers to the latest and greatest, and will also
301 contain the latest documentation on how to use BusyBox, what it can do,
302 what arguments its apps support, etc.
304 <p> <li> <b>10 December 1999 -- BusyBox 0.39 released</b>
306 This release includes fixes to init, reboot, halt, kill, and ls, and contains
307 the new apps ping, hostname, mkfifo, free, tail, du, tee, and head. A full
308 changelog can be found <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
309 <p> <li> <b>5 December 1999 -- BusyBox 0.38 released</b>
311 This release includes fixes to tar, cat, ls, dd, rm, umount, find, df,
312 and make install, and includes new apps syslogd/klogd and logger.
316 <!-- Begin Links section -->
318 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
325 <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
329 <li> <a href="http://busybox.lineo.com/">Take me back to http://busybox.lineo.com/</a>.
332 <li> <A HREF="http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/">
333 Free Software from Bruce Perens</A><br>
334 The original idea for BusyBox, and all versions up to 0.26 were written
335 by <A HREF="mailto:bruce@perens.com">Bruce Perens</a>. This is his BusyBox website.
338 <li> <A HREF="http://freshmeat.net/appindex/1999/04/11/923859921.html">
339 Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox</A>
342 <li> <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/software.html">Other cool embedded software</a>.
345 <li> <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/">opensource.lineo.com</a>.
348 <li> <A HREF="http://www.lineo.com/">Lineo</A> is sponsoring BusyBox development.
354 <!-- End of Table -->
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368 Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to
369 <a href="mailto:andersen@lineo.com">Erik Andersen</a><BR>
370 The Busybox logo is copyright 1999,2000, Erik Andersen.
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