-
-
- The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux
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-
-
-BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single
-small executable. It provides minimalist replacements for most of the utilities
-you usually find in fileutils, shellutils, findutils, textutils, grep, gzip,
-tar, etc. BusyBox provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any small or
-embedded system. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than
-their full featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide
-the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts.
-
-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, /etc, and a kernel.
-
-
-BusyBox is maintained by
-
-Erik Andersen, and licensed under the
-GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.
-
-
-
- Screenshot
-
- Because everybody loves screenshots, a screenshot of BusyBox
-is now available right here.
-
-
- Mailing List Information
-BusyBox now has a mailing list!
-To subscribe, go and visit this page.
-
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-
-
- Latest News
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-
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-
-
- - 18 November 2001 -- Help us buy busybox.net!
-
-
-
- Click here to help buy busybox.net!
-
-
-
-
- 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).
-
-
- 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...
-
-
- 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.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.
-
-
- - 23 August 2001 -- BusyBox 0.60.1 released
-
-
- 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 too
- 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.
-
- The
- changelog has all
- the details. As usual BusyBox 0.60.1 can be downloaded from
- ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox.
- Have Fun!
-
-
-
- - 2 August 2001 -- BusyBox 0.60.0 released
-
- I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of
- BusyBox 0.60.0. I have personally tested this release with libc5, glibc,
- and uClibc 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.
-
-
-
- Those wanting an easy way to test the 0.60.0 release with uClibc can
- use User-Mode Linux
- to give it a try by downloading and compiling
- buildroot.tar.gz.
- 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.
-
- Another cool thing is the nifty
- BusyBox Tutorial contributed by K Computing. This requires
- a ShockWave plugin (or standalone viewer), so you may want to grab the
- the GPLed shockwave viewer from here
- to view the tutorial.
-
-
- Finally, In case you didn't notice anything odd about the
- version number of this release, let me point out that this release
- is not 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.
-
-
- The
- changelog has all
- the details. As usual BusyBox 0.60.0 can be downloaded from
- ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox.
- Have Fun!
-
-
-
- - 7 July 2001 -- BusyBox 0.52 released
-
-
- 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 many 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).
-
-
- The
- changelog 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
- ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox.
- Have Fun!
-
-
-
- - 10 April 2001 - Graph of Busybox Growth
-
- 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 right here.
-
- (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.)
-
-
-
-
- - Old News
-
- For the old news, visit the old news page.
-
-
-
-
-
- |
-
- Download
-
- |
-
-
-
- - Source for the latest release can always be downloaded from
- ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox.
-
-
- A new snapshot of the source is made daily and is available as a GNU
- gzipped tarball right here.
-
-
- BusyBox now has its own publically browsable
- CVS tree,
- anonymous
- CVS access, and
- for those that are actively contributing there is even
- CVS write access.
-
-
-
-
-
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-
- Documentation
-
- |
-
-Current documentation for BusyBox includes:
-
- - BusyBox.html.
- This is a list of the all the available commands in BusyBox with
- complete usage information and examples of how to use each app. I
- have spent a lot of time updating these docs and trying to
- make them fairly comprehensive. If you find any errors (factual,
- grammatical, whatever) please let me know.
-
- README.
- This is the README file included in the busybox source release.
-
- BusyBox Bugs.
- Need to report a bug? Need to check if a bug has been filed?
-
- If you need more help, the BusyBox
- mailing list is
- a good place to start.
-
-
-
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-
-
- Important Links
-
-
- |
-
-
-
-
- -
- Free Software from Bruce Perens
- The original idea for BusyBox, and all versions up to 0.26 were written
- by Bruce Perens. This is his BusyBox website.
-
-
- -
- Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox
-
- - TinyLogin
- is a nice embedded tool for handling authentication, changing passwords,
- and similar tasks which nicely complements BusyBox.
-
-
- - uClibc
- is a C library for embedded systems. You can actually statically link
- a "Hello World" application under x86 that only takes 4k (as opposed to
- 200k under GNU libc). It can do dynamic linking too and works nicely with
- BusyBox to create very small embedded systems.
-
-
- - Other cool embedded software.
-
-
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-
- Products/Projects Using BusyBox
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-
-
- I know of the following products and/or projects that use BusyBox --
-listed in the order I happen to add them to the web page:
-
-
-
- Do you use BusyBox? I'd love to know about it and I'd be happy to link to
-you.
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