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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, 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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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:
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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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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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