BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind.
It is also extremely modular so you can easily include or exclude commands (or
features) at compile time. This makes it easy to customize your embedded
-systems. To create a working system, just add /dev, a kernel, and a shell.
-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.
+systems. To create a working system, just add /dev, /etc, and a kernel.
<p>
-BusyBox is now maintained by
+BusyBox is maintained by
<a href="http://codepoet.org/andersen/erik/erik.html">
-Erik Andersen</a>, and its ongoing development is being sponsored by
-<a href="http://www.lineo.com/">Lineo</a>.
-<p>
-BusyBox is licensed under the
+Erik Andersen</a>, and licensed under the
<a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE</a>.
<p>
<ul>
- <li> <b>10 April 2001 - Graph of Busybox Growth </b>
- <br>
- The illustrious Larry Doolittle has made a PostScript chart of the growth
- of the Busybox tarball size over time. It is available for downloading /
- viewing <a href= "busybox-growth.ps"> right here</a>.
+ <li> <b>18 November 2001 -- Help us buy busybox.net!</b>
+
+ <!-- Begin PayPal Logo -->
+ <center>
+ Click here to help buy busybox.net!
+ <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
+ <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
+ <input type="hidden" name="business" value="andersen@codepoet.org">
+ <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Support Busybox/Buy busybox.net">
+ <input type="hidden" name="image_url" value="https://https://busybox.lineo.com/images/busybox2.jpg">
+ <input type="hidden" name="no_shipping" value="1">
+ <input type="image" src="http://images.paypal.com/images/x-click-butcc-donate.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
+ </form>
+ </center>
+ <!-- End PayPal Logo -->
+
+ I've contacted the current owner of busybox.net and he is willing
+ to sell the domain name -- for $250. He also owns busybox.org
+ but will not part with it... I will then need to pay the
+ registry fee, so this will initially cost about $300. I would
+ also like to host busybox.net on my home machine (codepoet.org)
+ so I have full control over the system, but I would need to
+ increase the level of bandwidth I am paying for (there have been
+ over 1 Gigabyte of busybox source downloads for the month of
+ November alone -- other months have had more).
+ <p>
- <p> (Note that while the number of applets in Busybox has increased, you
- can still configure Busybox to be as small as you want by selectively
- turning off whichever applets you don't need.)
- <p>
+ I was going to pay it all myself, but my wife didn't like that
+ idea at all (big surprise). It turns out, she has better ideas
+ about what we should spend our money on that don't involve
+ busybox. She suggested I should ask for contributions on the
+ mailing list and web page. So...
+ <p>
- <li> <b>10 April 2001 -- BusyBox 0.51 released</b>
- <br>
+ I am hoping that if everyone could contribute a bit we could pick
+ up the busybox.net domain name, and cover the bandwidth costs. I
+ know that busybox is being used by a lot of companies as well as
+ individuals -- hopefully companies willing to contribute back a
+ bit. So if everyone could please help out, that would be
+ wonderful!
+ <p>
- BusyBox 0.51 (the "rock-solid release") is now out there. This
- release adds only 2 new applets: env and vi. The vi applet,
- contributed by Sterling Huxley, is very functional, and is only
- 22k. This release fixes 3 critical bugs in the 0.50 release.
- There were 2 potential segfaults in lash (the busybox shell) in
- the 0.50 release which are now fixed. Another critical bug in
- 0.50 which is now fixed: syslogd from 0.50 could potentially
- deadlock the init process and thereby break your entire system.
- <p>
+ p.s. I plan on updating the Changelog later this evening, and
+ releasing busybox 0.60.2 later tonight. I will probably just merge
+ in vodz' msh since it fixes known problems, and since I haven't had
+ time to make it uClinux safe. Changelog entries for busybox.stable
+ are welcome.
+
+ <p>
+ <li> <b>23 August 2001 -- BusyBox 0.60.1 released</b>
+ <br>
- There are a number of improvements in this release as well. For
- one thing, the wget applet is greatly improved. Dmitry Zakharov
- added FTP support, and Laurence Anderson make wget fully RFC
- compliant for HTTP 1.1. The mechanism for including utility
- functions in previous releases was clumsy and error prone. Now
- all utility functions are part of a new libbb library, which makes
- maintaining utility functions much simpler. And BusyBox now
- compiles on itanium systems (thanks to the Debian itanium porters
- for letting me use their system!).
+ This is a relatively minor bug fixing release that fixes
+ up the bugs that have shown up in the stable release in
+ the last few weeks. Fortunately, nothing <em>too</em>
+ serious has shown up. This release only fixes bugs -- no
+ new features, no new applets. So without further ado,
+ here it is. Come and get it.
<p>
- You can read the
- <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a> for
- complete details. BusyBox 0.51 can be downloaded from
+ The
+ <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a> has all
+ the details. As usual BusyBox 0.60.1 can be downloaded from
<a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox">ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox</a>.
<p>Have Fun!
<p>
- <li> <b>Busybox Boot-Floppy Image</b>
-
- <p>Because you asked for it, we have made available a <a href=
- "ftp://opensource.lineo.com/busybox/busybox.floppy.img"> Busybox boot floppy
- image</a>. Here's how you use it:
-
- <ol>
-
- <li> <a href= "ftp://opensource.lineo.com/busybox/busybox.floppy.img">
- Download the image</a>
- <li> dd it onto a floppy like so: <tt> dd if=busybox.floppy.img
- of=/dev/fd0 ; sync </tt>
-
- <li> Pop it in a machine and boot up.
-
- </ol>
-
- <p> If you want to look at the contents of the initrd image, do this:
-
- <pre>
- mount ./busybox.floppy.img /mnt -o loop -t msdos
- cp /mnt/initrd.gz /tmp
- umount /mnt
- gunzip /tmp/initrd.gz
- mount /tmp/initrd /mnt -o loop -t minix
- </pre>
-
-
- <li> <b>15 March 2001 -- BusyBox 0.50 released</b>
+ <li> <b>2 August 2001 -- BusyBox 0.60.0 released</b>
<br>
+ I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of
+ BusyBox 0.60.0. I have personally tested this release with libc5, glibc,
+ and <a href="http://cvs.uclinux.org/uClibc.html">uClibc</a> on
+ x86, ARM, and powerpc using linux 2.2 and 2.4, and I know a number
+ of people using it on everything from ia64 to m68k with great success.
+ Everything seems to be working very nicely now, so getting a nice
+ stable bug-free(tm) release out seems to be in order. This releases fixes
+ a memory leak in syslogd, a number of bugs in the ash and msh shells, and
+ cleans up a number of things.
+
+ <p>
- This release adds several new applets including ifconfig, route, pivot_root, stty,
- and tftp, and also fixes tons of bugs. Tab completion in the
- shell is now working very well, and the shell's environment variable
- expansion was fixed. Tons of other things were fixed or made
- smaller. For a fairly complete overview, see the
- <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
+ Those wanting an easy way to test the 0.60.0 release with uClibc can
+ use <a href="http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/">User-Mode Linux</a>
+ to give it a try by downloading and compiling
+ <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/buildroot.tar.gz">buildroot.tar.gz</a>.
+ You don't have to be root or reboot your machine to run test this way.
+ Preconfigured User-Mode Linux kernel source is also on oss.lineo.com.
<p>
- lash (the busybox shell) is still with us, fixed up a bit so it
- now behaves itself quite nicely. It really is quite usable as
- long as you don't expect it to provide Bourne shell grammer.
- Standard things like pipes, redirects, command line editing, and
- environment variable expansion work great. But we have found that
- this shell, while very usable, does not provide an extensible
- framework for adding in full Bourne shell behavior. So the first order of
- business as we begin working on the next BusyBox release will be to merge in the new shell
- currently in progress at
- <a href="http://doolittle.faludi.com/~larry/parser.html">Larry Doolittle's website</a>.
+ Another cool thing is the nifty <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/tutorial/index.html">
+ BusyBox Tutorial</a> contributed by K Computing. This requires
+ a ShockWave plugin (or standalone viewer), so you may want to grab the
+ the GPLed shockwave viewer from <a href="http://www.swift-tools.com/Flash/flash-0.4.10.tgz">here</a>
+ to view the tutorial.
<p>
+
+ Finally, In case you didn't notice anything odd about the
+ version number of this release, let me point out that this release
+ is <em>not</em> 0.53, because I bumped the version number up a
+ bit. This reflects the fact that this release is intended to form
+ a new stable BusyBox release series. If you need to rely on a
+ stable version of BusyBox, you should plan on using the stable
+ 0.60.x series. If bugs show up then I will release 0.60.1, then
+ 0.60.2, etc... This is also intended to deal with the fact that
+ the BusyBox build system will be getting a major overhaul for the
+ next release and I don't want that to break products that people
+ are shipping. To avoid that, the new build system will be
+ released as part of a new BusyBox development series that will
+ have some not-yet-decided-on odd version number. Once things
+ stabilize and the new build system is working for everyone, then
+ I will release that as a new stable release series.
-
- <li> <b>27 January 2001 -- BusyBox 0.49 released</b>
- <br>
-
- Several new applets, lots of bug fixes, cleanups, and many smaller
- things made nicer. Several cleanups and improvements to the shell.
- For a list of the most interesting changes
- you might want to look at the <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
- <p>
- Special thanks go out to Matt Kraai and Larry Doolittle for all their
- work on this release, and for keeping on top of things while I've been
- out of town.
<p>
- <em>Special Note</em><br>
-
- BusyBox 0.49 was supposed to have replaced lash, the BusyBox
- shell, with a new shell that understands full Bourne shell/Posix shell grammer.
- Well, that simply didn't happen in time for this release. A new
- shell that will eventually replace lash is already under
- construction. This new shell is being developed by Larry
- Doolittle, and could use all of our help. Please see the work in
- progress on <a href="http://doolittle.faludi.com/~larry/parser.html">Larry's website</a>
- and help out if you can. This shell will be included in the next
- release of BusyBox.
+ The
+ <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a> has all
+ the details. As usual BusyBox 0.60.0 can be downloaded from
+ <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox">ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox</a>.
+ <p>Have Fun!
<p>
- <li> <b>13 December 2000 -- BusyBox 0.48 released</b>
+
+ <li> <b>7 July 2001 -- BusyBox 0.52 released</b>
<br>
- This release fixes lots and lots of bugs. This has had some very
- rigorous testing, and looks very, very clean. The usual tar
- update of course: tar no longer breaks hardlinks, tar -xzf is
- optionally supported, and the LRP folks will be pleased to know
- that 'tar -X' and 'tar --exclude' are both now in. Applets are
- now looked up using a binary search making lash (the busybox
- shell) much faster. For the new debian-installer (for Debian
- woody) a .udeb can now be generated.
- <p>
- The curious can get a list of some of the more interesting changes by reading
- the <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
+ I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of
+ BusyBox 0.52 (the "new-and-improved rock-solid release"). This
+ release is the result of <em>many</em> hours of work and has tons
+ of bugfixes, optimizations, and cleanups. This release adds
+ several new applets, including several new shells (such as hush, msh,
+ and ash).
+
<p>
- Many thanks go out to the many many people that have contributed to
- this release, especially Matt Kraai, Larry Doolittle, and Kent Robotti.
+ The
+ <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a> covers
+ some of the more obvious details, but there are many many things that
+ are not mentioned, but have been improved in subtle ways. As usual,
+ BusyBox 0.52 can be downloaded from
+ <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox">ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox</a>.
+ <p>Have Fun!
<p>
+ <li> <b>10 April 2001 - Graph of Busybox Growth </b>
+ <br>
+ The illustrious Larry Doolittle has made a PostScript chart of the growth
+ of the Busybox tarball size over time. It is available for downloading /
+ viewing <a href= "busybox-growth.ps"> right here</a>.
+
+ <p> (Note that while the number of applets in Busybox has increased, you
+ can still configure Busybox to be as small as you want by selectively
+ turning off whichever applets you don't need.)
+ <p>
+
+
+
<li> <b>Old News</b>
<br>
For the old news, visit <a href="http://busybox.lineo.com/oldnews.html">the old news page</a>.
<li> <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/software.html">Other cool embedded software</a>.
<p>
- <li> <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/">opensource.lineo.com</a>.
- <p>
-
- <li> <A HREF="http://www.lineo.com/">Lineo</A> is sponsoring BusyBox development.
- <p>
-
</ul>
listed in the order I happen to add them to the web page:
<ul>
- <li> <a href="http://www.lineo.com/products/embedix_linux/">Lineo Embedix Linux</a>
<li> <a href="http://cvs.debian.org/boot-floppies/">Debian installer (boot floppies) project</a>
+ <li> <a href="http://redhat.com/">Red Hat 7.2 installer</a>
+ <li> <a
+ href="http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/slackware/source/rootdsks/">Slackware Installer</a>
<li> <a href="http://www.linuxrouter.org/">Linux Router Project </a>
<li> <a href="http://linux-embedded.org/">LEM</a>
<li> <a href="http://www.toms.net/rb/">tomsrtbt</a>
<li> <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">Linux Terminal Server Project</a>
<li> <a href="http://www.devil-linux.org/">Devil-Linux</a>
+ <li> <a href="http://dutnux.sourceforge.net/">DutNux</a>
+ <li> <a href="http://www.cachier.com/">Cachier</a>
+ <li> <a href="http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/mindi/">Mindi</a>
</ul>
<TD>
<font size="-1" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">
Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to
- <a href="mailto:andersen@lineo.com">Erik Andersen</a><BR>
+ <a href="mailto:andersen@codepoet.org">Erik Andersen</a><BR>
The Busybox logo is copyright 1999,2000,2001, Erik Andersen.
</font>
</TD>