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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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- 3 January 2002 -- Welcome to busybox.net!
Thanks to the generosity of a number of busybox users, we have been
able to purchase busybox.net (which is where you are probably
reading this). Right now, busybox.net and uclibc.org are both
living on my home system (at the end of my DSL line). I
apologize for the abrupt move off of busybox.lineo.com.
Unfortunately, I no longer have the access needed to keep that
system updated (for example, you might notice the daily snapshots
there stopped some time ago).
Busybox.net is currently hosted on my home server, at the end of a
DSL line. Unfortunately, the load on them is quite heavy. To address
this, I'm trying to make arrangements to get busybox.net co-located
directly at an ISP. To assist in the co-location effort, Mark Whitley (author of
busybox sed, cut, and grep) has donated his NetWinder computer for hosting
busybox.net and uclibc.org. Once this system is co-located, the
current speed problems should be completely eliminated. Hopefully,
too, some of you will volunteer to set up some mirror sites, to help
to distribute the load a bit.
Since some people expressed concern over BusyBox donations, let me
assure you that no one is getting rich here. All BusyBox and
uClibc donations will be spent paying for bandwidth and needed
hardware upgrades. For example, Mark's NetWinder currently has
just 64Meg of memory. As demonstrated when google spidered the site
the other day, 64 Megs in not enough, so I'm going to be ordering
256Megs of ram and a larger hard drive for the box today. So far,
donations received have been sufficient to cover almost all
expenses. In the future, we may have co-location fees to worry
about, but for now we are ok.
A HUGE thank-you goes out to everyone that has
contributed!
-Erik
- 20 November 2001 -- BusyBox 0.60.2 released
We am very pleased to announce that the BusyBox 0.60.2 (stable) is now
released to the world. This one is primarily a bugfix release for the
stable series, and it should take care of most everyone's needs
till we can get the nice new stuff we have been working on in CVS ready to
release (with the wonderful new buildsystem). The biggest change in this
release (beyond bugfixes) is the fact that msh (the minix shell) has been
re-worked by Vladimir N. Oleynik (vodz) and so it no longer crashes when
told to do complex things with backticks.
This release has been tested on x86, ARM, and powerpc using glibc 2.2.4,
libc5, and uClibc, so it should work with just about any Linux system you throw it at.
See the changelog
for most of the details. The last release was
very solid for people, and this one should be even better.
As usual BusyBox 0.60.2 can be downloaded from
http://www.busybox.net/downloads.
Have Fun.
-Erik
- Old News
For the old news, visit the old news page.
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Download
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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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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.
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Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox
- TinyLogin
is a nice embedded tool for handling authentication, changing passwords,
and similar tasks which nicely complements BusyBox.
- udhcp
is a tiny dhcp client and/or server which is ideal for embedded systems.
- 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.
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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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