-
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- The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux
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-
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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, 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.
-
-
-BusyBox is now maintained by
-
-Erik Andersen, and its ongoing development is being sponsored by
-Lineo.
-
-BusyBox is 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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-
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- Latest News
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-
- - 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.)
-
-
- - 10 April 2001 -- BusyBox 0.51 released
-
-
- 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.
-
-
- 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!).
-
- You can read the
- changelog for
- complete details. BusyBox 0.51 can be downloaded from
- ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox.
- Have Fun!
-
-
- - Busybox Boot-Floppy Image
-
-
Because you asked for it, we have made available a Busybox boot floppy
- image. Here's how you use it:
-
-
-
- -
- Download the image
-
-
- dd it onto a floppy like so: dd if=busybox.floppy.img
- of=/dev/fd0 ; sync
-
-
- Pop it in a machine and boot up.
-
-
-
- If you want to look at the contents of the initrd image, do this:
-
-
- 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
-
-
-
- - 15 March 2001 -- BusyBox 0.50 released
-
-
- 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
- changelog.
-
- 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
- Larry Doolittle's website.
-
-
-
- - 27 January 2001 -- BusyBox 0.49 released
-
-
- 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 changelog.
-
- 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.
-
- Special Note
-
- 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 Larry's website
- and help out if you can. This shell will be included in the next
- release of BusyBox.
-
-
- - 13 December 2000 -- BusyBox 0.48 released
-
-
- 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.
-
- The curious can get a list of some of the more interesting changes by reading
- the changelog.
-
- Many thanks go out to the many many people that have contributed to
- this release, especially Matt Kraai, Larry Doolittle, and Kent Robotti.
-
-
-
- - Old News
-
- For the old news, visit the old news page.
-
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-
- Download
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-
-
-
- - 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
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-
-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
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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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