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18 <B>B&nbsp;u&nbsp;s&nbsp;y&nbsp;B&nbsp;o&nbsp;x</B>
19 </FONT>
20 </TD>
21 </TR>
22 </TABLE>
23 <a href="/"><IMG SRC="images/busybox2.jpg" alt="BusyBox" border="0" width="360" height="230"</a><BR>
24
25
26<!-- Begin Introduction section -->
27
28
29<TABLE WIDTH=95% CELLSPACING=1 CELLPADDING=4 BORDER=1>
30<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
31 <A NAME="intro"> <BIG><B>
32 The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux
33 </font>
34 </A></B></BIG>
35</TD></TR>
36<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
37
38BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single
39small executable. It provides minimalist replacements for most of the utilities
40you usually find in fileutils, shellutils, findutils, textutils, grep, gzip,
41tar, etc. BusyBox provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any small
42or emdedded system. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options then
43their full featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide
44the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts.
45<p>
46BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind.
47It is also extremely modular so you can easily include or exclude commands (or
48features) at compile time. This makes it easy to customize your embedded
49systems. To create a working system, just add a kernel, a shell (such as ash),
50and an editor (such as elvis-tiny or ae).
51<p>
52
53BusyBox is now maintained by
54<a href="http://www.xmission.com/~andersen/erik/erik.html">
55Erik Andersen</a>, and its ongoing development is being sponsored by
56<a href="http://www.lineo.com/">Lineo</a>.
57<p>
58BusyBox is licensed under the
59<a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE</a>
60
61
62<!-- Begin Download section -->
63
64<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
65 <A NAME="download"><BIG><B>
66 Download
67 </A></B></BIG>
68</TD></TR>
69<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
70<ul>
71 <li> Source for the latest release can always be downloaded from
72 <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox">ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox</a>.
73</ul>
74
75
76<!-- Begin Latest News section -->
77
78<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
79 <A NAME="news">
80 <BIG><B>
81 Latest News</A>
82 </B></BIG>
83 </A>
84</TD></TR>
85<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
86
87<ul>
88
89 <p> <li> <b>19 April 2000 -- syslogd bugfix</b>
90 <br>
91 Turns out that there was still a bug in busybox syslogd.
92 For example, with the following test app:
93<pre>
94 #include &lt;syslog.h&gt
95
96 int do_log(char* msg, int delay)
97 {
98 openlog("testlog", LOG_PID, LOG_DAEMON);
99 while(1) {
100 syslog(LOG_ERR, "%s: testing one, two, three\n", msg);
101 sleep(delay);
102 }
103 closelog();
104 return(0);
105 };
106
107 int main(void)
108 {
109 if (fork()==0)
110 do_log("A", 2);
111 do_log("B", 3);
112 }
113</pre>
114 it should be logging stuff from both "A" and "B". As released in 0.43 only stuff
115 from "A" would have been logged. This means that if init tries to log something
116 while say ppp has the syslog open, init would block (which is bad, bad, bad).
117 <p>
118 Karl M. Hegbloom has created a
119 <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/busybox-0.43-syslog_patch">fix for the problem</a>.
120 Thanks Karl!
121
122
123 <p> <li> <b>18 April 2000 -- BusyBox 0.43 released (finally!)</b>
124 <br>
125 I have finally gotten everything into a state where I feel pretty
126 good about things. This is definitely the most stable, solid release
127 so far. A lot of bugs have been fixed, and the following new apps
128 have been added: sh, basename, dirname, killall, uptime,
129 freeramdisk, tr, echo, test, and usleep. Tar has been completely
130 rewritten from scratch. Bss size has also been greatly reduced.
131 More details are available in the
132 <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
133 Oh, and as a special bonus, I wrote some fairly comprehensive
134 <em>documentation</em>, complete with examples and full usage information.
135
136 <p>
137 Many thanks go out to the fine people that have helped by submitting patches
138 and bug reports; particularly instrumental in helping for this release were
139 Karl Hegbloom, Pavel Roskin, Friedrich Vedder, Emanuele Caratti,
140 Bob Tinsley, Nicolas Pitre, Avery Pennarun, Arne Bernin, John Beppu, and Jim Gleason.
141 There were others so if I somehow forgot to mention you, I'm very sorry.
142 <p>
143
144 You can grab BusyBox 0.43 tarballs <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/">here</a>.
145
146 <p> <li> <b>9 April 2000 -- BusyBox 0.43 pre release</b>
147 <br>
148 Unfortunately, I have not yet finished all the things I want to
149 do for BusyBox 0.43, so I am posting this pre-release for people
150 to poke at. This contains my complete rewrite of tar, which now weighs in at
151 5k (7k with all options turned on) and works for reading and writing
152 tarballs (which it does correctly for everything I have been able to throw
153 at it). Tar also (optionally) supports the "--exclude" option (mainly because
154 the Linux Router Project folks asked for it). This also has a pre-release
155 of the micro shell I have been writing. This pre-release should be stable
156 enough for production use -- it just isn't a release since I have some structural
157 changes I still want to make.
158 <p>
159 The pre-release can be found <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/">here</a>.
160 Please let me know ASAP if you find <em>any</em> bugs.
161
162 <p> <li> <b>28 March 2000 -- Andersen Baby Boy release</b>
163 <br>
164 I am pleased to announce that on Tuesday March 28th at 5:48pm, weighing in at 7
165 lbs. 12 oz, Micah Erik Andersen was born at LDS Hospital here in Salt Lake City.
166 He was born in the emergency room less then 5 minutes after we arrived -- and
167 it was such a relief that we even made it to the hospital at all. Despite the
168 fact that I was driving at an amazingly unlawful speed and honking at everybody
169 and thinking decidely unkind thoughts about the people in our way, my wife
170 (inconsiderate of my feelings and complete lack of medical training) was lying
171 down in the back seat saying things like "I think I need to start pushing now"
172 (which she then proceeded to do despite my best encouraging statements to the
173 contrary).
174 <p>
175 Anyway, I'm glad to note that despite the much-faster-than-we-were-expecting
176 labor, both Shaunalei and our new baby boy are doing wonderfuly.
177 <p>
178 So now that I am done with my excuse for the slow release cycle...
179 Progress on the next release of BusyBox has been slow but steady. I expect
180 to have a release sometime during the first week of April. This release will
181 include a number of important changes, including the addition of a shell, a
182 re-write of tar (to accomodate the Linux Router Project), and syslogd can now
183 accept multiple concurrent connections, fixing lots of unexpected blocking
184 problems.
185
186
187 <p> <li> <b>11 February 2000 -- BusyBox 0.42 released</b>
188 <br>
189
190 This is the most solid BusyBox release so far. Many, many
191 bugs have been fixed. See the
192<a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a> for details.
193
194 Of particular interest, init will now cleanly unmount
195 filesystems on reboot, cp and mv have been rewritten and
196 behave much better, and mount and umount no longer leak
197 loop devices. Many thanks go out to Randolph Chung,
198 Karl M. Hegbloom, Taketoshi Sano, and Pavel Roskin for
199 their hard work on this release of BusyBox. Please pound
200 on it and let me know if you find any bugs.
201
202 <p> <li> <b>19 January 2000 -- BusyBox 0.41 released</b>
203 <br>
204
205 This release includes bugfixes to cp, mv, logger, true, false,
206 mkdir, syslogd, and init. New apps include wc, hostid,
207 logname, tty, whoami, and yes. New features include loop device
208 support in mount and umount, and better TERM handling by init.
209 The changelog can be found <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
210
211 <p> <li> <b>7 January 2000 -- BusyBox 0.40 released</b>
212 <br>
213
214 This release includes bugfixes to init (now includes inittab support),
215 syslogd, head, logger, du, grep, cp, mv, sed, dmesg, ls, kill, gunzip, and mknod.
216 New apps include sort, uniq, lsmod, rmmod, fbset, and loadacm.
217 In particular, this release fixes an important bug in tar which
218 in some cases produced serious security problems.
219 As always, the changelog can be found <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
220
221 <p> <li> <b>11 December 1999 -- BusyBox Website</b>
222 <br>
223 I have received permission from Bruce Perens (the original author of BusyBox)
224 to set up this site as the new primary website for BusyBox. This website
225 will always contain pointers to the latest and greatest, and will also
226 contain the latest documentation on how to use BusyBox, what it can do,
227 what arguments its apps support, etc.
228
229 <p> <li> <b>10 December 1999 -- BusyBox 0.39 released</b>
230 <br>
231 This release includes fixes to init, reboot, halt, kill, and ls, and contains
232 the new apps ping, hostname, mkfifo, free, tail, du, tee, and head. A full
233 changelog can be found <a href="ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
234 <p> <li> <b>5 December 1999 -- BusyBox 0.38 released</b>
235 <br>
236 This release includes fixes to tar, cat, ls, dd, rm, umount, find, df,
237 and make install, and includes new apps syslogd/klogd and logger.
238</ul>
239
240
241<!-- Begin Docs section -->
242
243<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
244 <A NAME="docs"><BIG><B>
245 Documentation
246 </A></B></BIG>
247</TD></TR>
248<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
249Current documentation for BusyBox includes:
250<ul>
251 <li> <a href="BusyBox.html">BusyBox.html</a>
252 This is a list of the all the available commands in BusyBox with complete
253 usage information and examples of how to use each app. I spent
254 a <em>lot</em> of time updating these docs and trying to make them
255 fairly comprehensive for the BusyBox 0.43 release. If you find any
256 errors (factual, grammatical, whatever) please let me know.
257
258 <li> More documentation will follow.
259</ul>
260
261
262<!-- Begin Links section -->
263
264<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
265 <A NAME="related">
266 <BIG><B>
267 Related Software</A>
268 </B></BIG>
269 </A>
270</TD></TR>
271<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
272
273<ul>
274
275 <li><a href="http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/shells/ash.html">ash</a>
276 is a very small Bourne shell. If you need a shell for your embedded systems, this is it.
277 <p>
278
279 <li><a href="http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/base/ae.html">ae</a>
280 is a tiny full-screen text editor with both modal (vi-like) and modeless
281 (emacs-like) modes, determined by an ae.rc config file. It makes a nice editor
282 if people that don't know "vi" will need to work on your embedded system.
283 <p>
284
285 <li> <a href="http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/base/elvis-tiny.html">elvis-tiny</a>
286 is based on a 1991 Minix version of the elvis "vi" clone. It behaves as one would
287 expect a minamalist vi to behave, and is very small.
288 <p>
289
290 <li> <a href="http://www.asty.org/nano/">nano</a>
291 A small GPLed pico clone that makes a nice editor for people that don't know "vi".
292 <p>
293
294 <li><a href="http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/iproute.html">iproute</a>
295 Much more flexible replacement for ifconfig, route, etc. It is quite small, and for
296 most networking applications, it is all you need. It also provides support for extremely
297 advanced networking and provides Quality of Service(QoS) support, but most people will
298 just need to use the "ip" command and will not even need to install the rest.
299 <p>
300
301 <li><a href="http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/pump.html">Pump</a>
302 This is the DHCP/BOOTP client written by RedHat. When compiled properly, it
303 gives you dhcp client support for about 35k.
304 <p>
305
306 <li><a href="http://www.pcug.org.au/~dbell/">sash</a>
307 The Stand Alone SHell. This is a small shell (not Bourne shell compatable)
308 that is similar to busybox in that it provides a number of common utilities as built-ins.
309 <p>
310
311 <li><a href="http://sourceware.cygnus.com/newlib/">NewLib</a>
312 This is a small C library intended for use on embedded systems. If you are finding
313 GNU libc is a bit too big for your applications, try NewLib and it may help.
314 <p>
315
316 <li><a href="http://linuxassembly.org/asmutils.html">asmutils</a>
317 asmutils is similar to BusyBox in that it provides a number of common application
318 for embedded systems that are very tiny. In fact, they are a _lot_ smaller than the
319 equivalent apps in busybox -- but the price you pay for the size is reduced portability
320 (x86 only) and interfaces that are tied directly to a perticular kernel (no libc involved).
321 <p>
322
323 <li><a href="http://tinylogin.lineo.com/">TinyLogin</a>
324 is a nice embedded tool for handling authentication, changing passwords,
325 and similar tasks, and which nicely complements BusyBox.
326 <p>
327
328</ul>
329
330<!-- Begin Projects section -->
331
332<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
333 <A NAME="docs"><BIG><B>
334 Projects using BusyBox
335 </A></B></BIG>
336</TD></TR>
337<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
338I know of the following projects that use BusyBox
339<ul>
340 <li> <a href="http://www.lineo.com/products/embedix.html">Lineo Embedix Linux</a>
341 <li> <a href="http://cvs.debian.org/boot-floppies/">Debian boot floppies project</a>
342 <li> <a href="http://www.linuxrouter.org/">Linux Router Project </a>
343 <li> <a href="http://linux-embedded.org/">LEM</a>
344 <li> <a href="http://www.toms.net/rb/">tomsrtbt</a>
345
346</ul>
347Do you use BusyBox? I'd love to know about it and I'd be happy to link to you.
348
349
350
351<!-- Begin Links section -->
352
353<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
354 <A NAME="links">
355 <BIG><B>
356 Important Links</A>
357 </B></BIG>
358 </A>
359</TD></TR>
360<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
361
362<ul>
363
364 <li> <A HREF="http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/">
365 Free Software from Bruce Perens</A><br>
366 The original idea for BusyBox, and all versions up to 0.26 were written
367 by <A HREF="mailto:bruce@perens.com">Bruce Perens</a>. This is his BusyBox website.
368 <p>
369
370 <li> <A HREF="http://freshmeat.net/appindex/1999/04/11/923859921.html">
371 Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox</A>
372 <p>
373
374 <li> <A HREF="http://www.lineo.com/">Lineo</A> is sponsoring BusyBox development.
375 <p>
376
377</ul>
378
379
380
381
382<!-- End of Table -->
383
384</TD></TR>
385</TABLE>
386</P>
387
388
389
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394 <TD>
395 <font size="-1" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">
396 Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to
397 <a href="mailto:andersen@lineo.com">Erik Andersen</a><BR>
398 The Busybox logo is copyright 1999,2000, Erik Andersen.
399 </font>
400 </TD>
401
402 <TD>
403 <a href="http://www.vim.org"><img border=0 width=88 height=32
404 src="images/anim.written.in.vi.gif"
405 alt="This site created with the vi editor"></a>
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410 src="images/gfx_by_gimp.gif" alt="Graphics by GIMP"></a>
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414 <a href="http://www.linuxtoday.com"><img width=90 height=36
415 src="images/ltbutton2.jpg" alt="Linux Today"></a>
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417
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420 src="images/sdsmall.gif" alt="Slashdot"></a>
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