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<B>B&nbsp;u&nbsp;s&nbsp;y&nbsp;B&nbsp;o&nbsp;x</B>
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Older BusyBox News</A>
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<ul>
<p> <li> <b>Take me back to the <a href="http://busybox.net/">BusyBox</a> web site.</b>
<hr>
<li> <b>18 November 2001 -- Help us buy busybox.net!</b>
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I've contacted the current owner of busybox.net and he is willing
to sell the domain name -- for $250. He also owns busybox.org but
will not part with it... I will then need to pay the registry fee
for a couple of years and start paying for bandwidth, so this will
initially cost about $300. I would like to host busybox.net on my
home machine (codepoet.org) so I have full control over the system,
but to do that would require that I increase the level of bandwidth
I am paying for. Did you know that so far this month, there
have been over 1.4 Gigabytes of busybox ftp downloads? I don't
even <em>know</em> how much CVS bandwidth it requires. For the
time being, Lineo has continued to graciously provide this
bandwidth, despite the fact that I no longer work for them. If I
start running this all on my home machine, paying for the needed bandwidth
will start costing some money.
<p>
I was going to pay it all myself, but my wife didn't like that
idea at all (big surprise). It turns out &lt;insert argument
where she wins and I don't&gt; she has better ideas
about what we should spend our money on that don't involve
busybox. She suggested I should ask for contributions on the
mailing list and web page. So...
<p>
I am hoping that if everyone could contribute a bit, we could pick
up the busybox.net domain name and cover the bandwidth costs. I
know that busybox is being used by a lot of companies as well as
individuals -- hopefully people and companies that are willing to
contribute back a bit. So if everyone could please help out, that
would be wonderful!
<p>
<li> <b>23 August 2001 -- BusyBox 0.60.1 released</b>
<br>
This is a relatively minor bug fixing release that fixes
up the bugs that have shown up in the stable release in
the last few weeks. Fortunately, nothing <em>too</em>
serious has shown up. This release only fixes bugs -- no
new features, no new applets. So without further ado,
here it is. Come and get it.
<p>
The
<a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a> has all
the details. As usual BusyBox 0.60.1 can be downloaded from
<a href="http://busybox.net/downloads">http://busybox.net/downloads</a>.
<p>Have Fun!
<p>
<li> <b>2 August 2001 -- BusyBox 0.60.0 released</b>
<br>
I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of
BusyBox 0.60.0. I have personally tested this release with libc5, glibc,
and <a href="http://uclibc.org/">uClibc</a> on
x86, ARM, and powerpc using linux 2.2 and 2.4, and I know a number
of people using it on everything from ia64 to m68k with great success.
Everything seems to be working very nicely now, so getting a nice
stable bug-free(tm) release out seems to be in order. This releases fixes
a memory leak in syslogd, a number of bugs in the ash and msh shells, and
cleans up a number of things.
<p>
Those wanting an easy way to test the 0.60.0 release with uClibc can
use <a href="http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/">User-Mode Linux</a>
to give it a try by downloading and compiling
<a href="ftp://busybox.net/buildroot.tar.gz">buildroot.tar.gz</a>.
You don't have to be root or reboot your machine to run test this way.
Preconfigured User-Mode Linux kernel source is also on busybox.net.
<p>
Another cool thing is the nifty <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/tutorial/index.html">
BusyBox Tutorial</a> contributed by K Computing. This requires
a ShockWave plugin (or standalone viewer), so you may want to grab the
the GPLed shockwave viewer from <a href="http://www.swift-tools.com/Flash/flash-0.4.10.tgz">here</a>
to view the tutorial.
<p>
Finally, In case you didn't notice anything odd about the
version number of this release, let me point out that this release
is <em>not</em> 0.53, because I bumped the version number up a
bit. This reflects the fact that this release is intended to form
a new stable BusyBox release series. If you need to rely on a
stable version of BusyBox, you should plan on using the stable
0.60.x series. If bugs show up then I will release 0.60.1, then
0.60.2, etc... This is also intended to deal with the fact that
the BusyBox build system will be getting a major overhaul for the
next release and I don't want that to break products that people
are shipping. To avoid that, the new build system will be
released as part of a new BusyBox development series that will
have some not-yet-decided-on odd version number. Once things
stabilize and the new build system is working for everyone, then
I will release that as a new stable release series.
<p>
The
<a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a> has all
the details. As usual BusyBox 0.60.0 can be downloaded from
<a href="http://busybox.net/downloads">http://busybox.net/downloads</a>.
<p>Have Fun!
<p>
<li> <b>7 July 2001 -- BusyBox 0.52 released</b>
<br>
I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of
BusyBox 0.52 (the "new-and-improved rock-solid release"). This
release is the result of <em>many</em> hours of work and has tons
of bugfixes, optimizations, and cleanups. This release adds
several new applets, including several new shells (such as hush, msh,
and ash).
<p>
The
<a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a> covers
some of the more obvious details, but there are many many things that
are not mentioned, but have been improved in subtle ways. As usual,
BusyBox 0.52 can be downloaded from
<a href="http://busybox.net/downloads">http://busybox.net/downloads</a>.
<p>Have Fun!
<p>
<li> <b>10 April 2001 - Graph of Busybox Growth </b>
<br>
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 <a href= "busybox-growth.ps"> right here</a>.
<p> (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.)
<p>
<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="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a> for
complete details. BusyBox 0.51 can be downloaded from
<a href="http://busybox.net/downloads">http://busybox.net/downloads</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=
"http://busybox.net/downloads/busybox.floppy.img"> Busybox boot floppy
image</a>. Here's how you use it:
<ol>
<li> <a href= "http://busybox.net/downloads/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="http://busybox.net/downloads/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="http://busybox.net/downloads/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="http://busybox.net/downloads/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>
<p> <li> <b>26 September 2000 -- BusyBox 0.47 released</b>
<br>
This release fixes lots of bugs (including an ugly bug in 0.46
syslogd that could fork-bomb your system). Added several new
apps: rdate, wget, getopt, dos2unix, unix2dos, reset, unrpm,
renice, xargs, and expr. syslogd now supports network logging.
There are the usual tar updates. Most apps now use getopt for
more correct option parsing.
See the <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a>
for complete details.
<p> <li> <b>11 July 2000 -- BusyBox 0.46 released</b>
<br>
This release fixes several bugs (including a ugly bug in tar,
and fixes for NFSv3 mount support). Added a dumpkmap to allow
people to dump a binary keymaps for use with 'loadkmap', and a
completely reworked 'grep' and 'sed' which should behave better.
BusyBox shell can now also be used as a login shell.
See the <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a>
for complete details.
<p> <li> <b>21 June 2000 -- BusyBox 0.45 released</b>
<br>
This release has been slow in coming, but is very solid at this
point. BusyBox now supports libc5 as well as GNU libc. This
release provides the following new apps: cut, tr, insmod, ar,
mktemp, setkeycodes, md5sum, uuencode, uudecode, which, and
telnet. There are bug fixes for just about every app as well (see
the <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a> for
details).
<p>
Also, some exciting infrastructure news! Busybox now has its own
<a href="http://busybox.net/lists/busybox/">mailing list</a>,
publically browsable
<a href="http://busybox.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb/busybox/">CVS tree</a>,
anonymous
<a href="http://busybox.net/cvs_anon.html">CVS access</a>, and
for those that are actively contributing there is even
<a href="http://busybox.net/cvs_write.html">CVS write access</a>.
I think this will be a huge help to the ongoing development of BusyBox.
<p>
Also, for the curious, there is no 0.44 release. Somehow 0.44 got announced
a few weeks ago prior to its actually being released. To avoid any confusion
we are just skipping 0.44.
<p>
Many thanks go out to the many people that have contributed to this release
of BusyBox (esp. Pavel Roskin)!
<p> <li> <b>19 April 2000 -- syslogd bugfix</b>
<br>
Turns out that there was still a bug in busybox syslogd.
For example, with the following test app:
<pre>
#include &lt;syslog.h&gt;
int do_log(char* msg, int delay)
{
openlog("testlog", LOG_PID, LOG_DAEMON);
while(1) {
syslog(LOG_ERR, "%s: testing one, two, three\n", msg);
sleep(delay);
}
closelog();
return(0);
};
int main(void)
{
if (fork()==0)
do_log("A", 2);
do_log("B", 3);
}
</pre>
it should be logging stuff from both "A" and "B". As released in 0.43 only stuff
from "A" would have been logged. This means that if init tries to log something
while say ppp has the syslog open, init would block (which is bad, bad, bad).
<p>
Karl M. Hegbloom has created a
<a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/busybox-0.43-syslog_patch">fix for the problem</a>.
Thanks Karl!
<p> <li> <b>18 April 2000 -- BusyBox 0.43 released (finally!)</b>
<br>
I have finally gotten everything into a state where I feel pretty
good about things. This is definitely the most stable, solid release
so far. A lot of bugs have been fixed, and the following new apps
have been added: sh, basename, dirname, killall, uptime,
freeramdisk, tr, echo, test, and usleep. Tar has been completely
rewritten from scratch. Bss size has also been greatly reduced.
More details are available in the
<a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
Oh, and as a special bonus, I wrote some fairly comprehensive
<em>documentation</em>, complete with examples and full usage information.
<p>
Many thanks go out to the fine people that have helped by submitting patches
and bug reports; particularly instrumental in helping for this release were
Karl Hegbloom, Pavel Roskin, Friedrich Vedder, Emanuele Caratti,
Bob Tinsley, Nicolas Pitre, Avery Pennarun, Arne Bernin, John Beppu, and Jim Gleason.
There were others so if I somehow forgot to mention you, I'm very sorry.
<p>
You can grab BusyBox 0.43 tarballs <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/">here</a>.
<p> <li> <b>9 April 2000 -- BusyBox 0.43 pre release</b>
<br>
Unfortunately, I have not yet finished all the things I want to
do for BusyBox 0.43, so I am posting this pre-release for people
to poke at. This contains my complete rewrite of tar, which now weighs in at
5k (7k with all options turned on) and works for reading and writing
tarballs (which it does correctly for everything I have been able to throw
at it). Tar also (optionally) supports the "--exclude" option (mainly because
the Linux Router Project folks asked for it). This also has a pre-release
of the micro shell I have been writing. This pre-release should be stable
enough for production use -- it just isn't a release since I have some structural
changes I still want to make.
<p>
The pre-release can be found <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/">here</a>.
Please let me know ASAP if you find <em>any</em> bugs.
<p> <li> <b>28 March 2000 -- Andersen Baby Boy release</b>
<br>
I am pleased to announce that on Tuesday March 28th at 5:48pm, weighing in at 7
lbs. 12 oz, Micah Erik Andersen was born at LDS Hospital here in Salt Lake City.
He was born in the emergency room less then 5 minutes after we arrived -- and
it was such a relief that we even made it to the hospital at all. Despite the
fact that I was driving at an amazingly unlawful speed and honking at everybody
and thinking decidedly unkind thoughts about the people in our way, my wife
(inconsiderate of my feelings and complete lack of medical training) was lying
down in the back seat saying things like "I think I need to start pushing now"
(which she then proceeded to do despite my best encouraging statements to the
contrary).
<p>
Anyway, I'm glad to note that despite the much-faster-than-we-were-expecting
labor, both Shaunalei and our new baby boy are doing wonderfully.
<p>
So now that I am done with my excuse for the slow release cycle...
Progress on the next release of BusyBox has been slow but steady. I expect
to have a release sometime during the first week of April. This release will
include a number of important changes, including the addition of a shell, a
re-write of tar (to accommodate the Linux Router Project), and syslogd can now
accept multiple concurrent connections, fixing lots of unexpected blocking
problems.
<p> <li> <b>11 February 2000 -- BusyBox 0.42 released</b>
<br>
This is the most solid BusyBox release so far. Many, many
bugs have been fixed. See the
<a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a> for details.
Of particular interest, init will now cleanly unmount
filesystems on reboot, cp and mv have been rewritten and
behave much better, and mount and umount no longer leak
loop devices. Many thanks go out to Randolph Chung,
Karl M. Hegbloom, Taketoshi Sano, and Pavel Roskin for
their hard work on this release of BusyBox. Please pound
on it and let me know if you find any bugs.
<p> <li> <b>19 January 2000 -- BusyBox 0.41 released</b>
<br>
This release includes bugfixes to cp, mv, logger, true, false,
mkdir, syslogd, and init. New apps include wc, hostid,
logname, tty, whoami, and yes. New features include loop device
support in mount and umount, and better TERM handling by init.
The changelog can be found <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
<p> <li> <b>7 January 2000 -- BusyBox 0.40 released</b>
<br>
This release includes bugfixes to init (now includes inittab support),
syslogd, head, logger, du, grep, cp, mv, sed, dmesg, ls, kill, gunzip, and mknod.
New apps include sort, uniq, lsmod, rmmod, fbset, and loadacm.
In particular, this release fixes an important bug in tar which
in some cases produced serious security problems.
As always, the changelog can be found <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
<p> <li> <b>11 December 1999 -- BusyBox Website</b>
<br>
I have received permission from Bruce Perens (the original author of BusyBox)
to set up this site as the new primary website for BusyBox. This website
will always contain pointers to the latest and greatest, and will also
contain the latest documentation on how to use BusyBox, what it can do,
what arguments its apps support, etc.
<p> <li> <b>10 December 1999 -- BusyBox 0.39 released</b>
<br>
This release includes fixes to init, reboot, halt, kill, and ls, and contains
the new apps ping, hostname, mkfifo, free, tail, du, tee, and head. A full
changelog can be found <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
<p> <li> <b>5 December 1999 -- BusyBox 0.38 released</b>
<br>
This release includes fixes to tar, cat, ls, dd, rm, umount, find, df,
and make install, and includes new apps syslogd/klogd and logger.
</ul>
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Important Links</A>
</B></BIG>
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<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
<ul>
<li> <a href="http://busybox.net/">Take me back to http://busybox.net/</a>.
<p>
<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/appindex/1999/04/11/923859921.html">
Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox</A>
<p>
<li> <a href="http://busybox.net/software.html">Cool embedded software</a>.
<p>
</ul>
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Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to
<a href="mailto:andersen@codepoet.org">Erik Andersen</a><BR>
The Busybox logo is copyright 1999-2002, Erik Andersen.
</font>
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