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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 GNU
fileutils, shellutils, etc. 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 provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any
small or embedded system.
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 |
- 26 October 2002 -- BusyBox 0.60.5 released
I am very pleased to announce that the BusyBox 0.60.5 (stable)
is now available for download. This is a bugfix release for
the stable series to address all the problems that have turned
up since the last release. Unfortunately, the previous release
had a few nasty bugs (i.e. init could deadlock, gunzip -c tried
to delete source files, cp -a wouldn't copy symlinks, and init
was not always providing controlling ttys when it should have).
I know I said that the previous release would be the end of the
0.60.x series. Well, it turns out I'm a liar. But this time I
mean it (just like last time ;-). This will be the last
release for the 0.60.x series -- all further development work
will be done for the development busybox tree. Expect the development
version to have its first real release very very soon now...
The changelog has all
the details. As usual you can download busybox here.
Have Fun!
- 18 September 2002 -- BusyBox 0.60.4 released
I am very pleased to announce that the BusyBox 0.60.4
(stable) is now available for download. This is primarily
a bugfix release for the stable series to address all
the problems that have turned up since the last
release. This will be the last release for the 0.60.x series.
I mean it this time -- all further development work will be done
on the development busybox tree, which is quite solid now and
should soon be getting its first real release.
The changelog has all
the details. As usual you can download busybox here.
Have Fun!
- 27 April 2002 -- BusyBox 0.60.3 released
I am very pleased to announce that the BusyBox 0.60.3 (stable) is
now available for download. This is primarily a bugfix release
for the stable series. A number of problems have turned up since
the last release, and this should address most of those problems.
This should be the last release for the 0.60.x series. The
development busybox tree has been progressing nicely, and will
hopefully be ready to become the next stable release.
The changelog has all
the details. As usual you can download busybox here.
Have Fun!
- 6 March 2002 -- busybox.net now has mirrors!
Busybox.net is now much more available, thanks to
the fine folks at http://i-netinnovations.com/
who are providing hosting for busybox.net and
uclibc.org. In addition, we now have two mirrors:
http://busybox.linuxmagic.com/
in Canada and
http://busybox.csservers.de/
in Germany. I hope this makes things much more
accessible for everyone!
- Old News
For the old news, visit the
old news page.
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| Sponsors |
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Please visit our sponsors and thank them for their
support! They have provided money for equipment and
bandwidth. Next time you need help with a project,
consider these fine companies!
Several individuals have also contributed. If you have
already contributed and would like your name added
here, just let me know. If you would like to be a
BusyBox sponsor, email Erik.
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| Download |
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Source for the latest release can always be
downloaded from http://www.busybox.net/downloads.
BusyBox now has two CVS trees. The "busybox-stable"
tree contains the latest updates to the 0.60.x stable series.
The "busybox" tree contains the latest development version
of busybox.
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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.
- 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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