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| <B>B u s y B o x</B> |
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| <a href="/"><IMG SRC="images/busybox2.jpg" alt="BusyBox" border="0" width="360" height="230"></a><BR> |
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| <!-- Begin Introduction section --> |
| |
| |
| <TABLE WIDTH="95%" CELLSPACING=1 CELLPADDING=4 BORDER=1> |
| <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center> |
| <A NAME="intro"> <BIG><B> |
| The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux |
| </B></BIG></A> |
| </TD></TR> |
| <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0"> |
| |
| 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. |
| <p> |
| 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. |
| <p> |
| |
| BusyBox is now 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 |
| <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE</a> |
| <p> |
| |
| |
| <h3> Screenshot </h3> |
| |
| <p> Because everybody loves screenshots, a screenshot of BusyBox |
| is now available <a href="screenshot.html"> right here</a> |
| |
| |
| <H3>Mailing List Information</h3> |
| BusyBox now has a <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/lists/busybox/">mailing list</a>! |
| To subscribe, go and visit <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/mailman/listinfo/busybox">this page</a>. |
| |
| <!-- Begin Latest News section --> |
| |
| <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center> |
| <A NAME="news"> |
| <BIG><B> |
| Latest News |
| </B></BIG> |
| </A> |
| </TD></TR> |
| <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0"> |
| |
| <ul> |
| |
| <li> <b>10 April 2001 -- BusyBox 0.51 released</b> |
| <br> |
| |
| 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> |
| |
| 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!). |
| <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 |
| <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> |
| <br> |
| |
| 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>. |
| <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>. |
| <p> |
| |
| |
| <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. |
| <p> |
| |
| <li> <b>13 December 2000 -- BusyBox 0.48 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>. |
| <p> |
| Many thanks go out to the many many people that have contributed to |
| this release, especially Matt Kraai, Larry Doolittle, and Kent Robotti. |
| <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>. |
| </ul> |
| |
| |
| <!-- Begin Download section --> |
| |
| <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center> |
| <A NAME="download"><BIG><B> |
| Download |
| </B></BIG></A> |
| </TD></TR> |
| <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0"> |
| <ul> |
| |
| <li> Source for the latest release can always be downloaded from |
| <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox">ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox</a>. |
| |
| <li> A new snapshot of the source is made daily and is available as a GNU |
| gzipped tarball <a href="busybox.tar.gz"> right here</a>. |
| |
| <li> BusyBox now has its own publically browsable |
| <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb/busybox/">CVS tree</a>, |
| anonymous |
| <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cvs_anon.html">CVS access</a>, and |
| for those that are actively contributing there is even |
| <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/cvs_write.html">CVS write access</a>. |
| |
| </ul> |
| |
| |
| <!-- Begin Docs section --> |
| |
| <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center> |
| <A NAME="docs"><BIG><B> |
| Documentation |
| </B></BIG></A> |
| </TD></TR> |
| <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0"> |
| Current documentation for BusyBox includes: |
| <ul> |
| <li> <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/BusyBox.html">BusyBox.html</a>. |
| 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 <em>lot</em> of time updating these docs and trying to |
| make them fairly comprehensive. If you find any errors (factual, |
| grammatical, whatever) please let me know. |
| <li> <a href="ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox/README">README</a>. |
| This is the README file included in the busybox source release. |
| <li> <a href="http://bugs.lineo.com/db/pa/lbusybox.html">BusyBox Bugs</a>. |
| Need to report a bug? Need to check if a bug has been filed? |
| <li> If you need more help, the BusyBox |
| <a href="http://opensource.lineo.com/lists/busybox/">mailing list</a> is |
| a good place to start. |
| </ul> |
| |
| |
| <!-- Begin Links section --> |
| |
| <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center> |
| <A NAME="links"> |
| <BIG><B> |
| Important Links |
| </B></BIG> |
| </A> |
| </TD></TR> |
| <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0"> |
| |
| <ul> |
| |
| <li> <A HREF="http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/"> |
| Free Software from Bruce Perens</A><br> |
| The original idea for BusyBox, and all versions up to 0.26 were written |
| by <A HREF="mailto:bruce@perens.com">Bruce Perens</a>. This is his BusyBox website. |
| <p> |
| |
| <li> <A HREF="http://freshmeat.net/projects/busybox/"> |
| Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox</A> |
| <p> |
| <li><a href="http://tinylogin.lineo.com/">TinyLogin</a> |
| is a nice embedded tool for handling authentication, changing passwords, |
| and similar tasks which nicely complements BusyBox. |
| <p> |
| |
| <li><a href="http://cvs.uclinux.org/uClibc.html">uClibc</a> |
| 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. |
| <p> |
| |
| <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> |
| |
| |
| <!-- Begin Projects section --> |
| |
| <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center> |
| <A NAME="projects"><BIG><B> |
| Products/Projects Using BusyBox |
| </B></BIG></A> |
| </TD></TR> |
| <TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0"> |
| |
| <p> 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: |
| |
| <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://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.stormix.com/">Stormix Installer</a> |
| <li> <a href="http://www.emacinc.com/linux2_sbc.htm">EMAC Linux 2.0 SBC</a> |
| <li> <a href="http://www.trinux.org/">Trinux</a> |
| <li> <a href="http://oddas.sourceforge.net/">ODDAS project</a> |
| <li> <a href="http://www.kerbango.com/">The Kerbango Internet Radio</a> |
| <li> <a href="http://www.linuxmagic.com/vpn/">LinuxMagic VPN Firewall</a> |
| <li> <a href="http://byld.sourceforge.net/">Build Your Linux Disk</a> |
| <li> <a href="http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~ichi/baslinux.html">BasicLinux</a> |
| <li> <a href="http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/recovery">Zdisk</a> |
| <li> <a href="http://www.adtran.com">AdTran - VPN/firewall VPN Linux Distribution</a> |
| <li> <a href="http://mkcdrec.ota.be/">mkCDrec - make CD-ROM recovery</a> |
| <li> <a href="http://recycle.lbl.gov/~ldoolitt/bse/">Linux on nanoEngine</a> |
| <li> <a href="http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/"> Floppyfw</a> |
| |
| <li> <a href="http://midori.transmeta.com/"> Midori Linux</a> - <a href= |
| "http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,42399,00.html"> Article on |
| Midori Linux</a> on <a href= "http://www.wired.com"> Wired</a>. Quote from |
| Erik at the top of <a href= |
| "http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,42399-2,00.html"> this |
| page</a> |
| |
| </ul> |
| |
| <p> Do you use BusyBox? I'd love to know about it and I'd be happy to link to |
| you. |
| |
| |
| |
| <!-- End of Table --> |
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| Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to |
| <a href="mailto:andersen@lineo.com">Erik Andersen</a><BR> |
| The Busybox logo is copyright 1999,2000,2001, Erik Andersen. |
| </font> |
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| src="images/anim.written.in.vi.gif" |
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