B u s y B o x

The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux

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, /etc, and a kernel.

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.

Latest News

- 2 August 2001 -- BusyBox 0.60.0 released
  I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of BusyBox 0.60.0. I have personally tested this release with libc5, glibc, and uClibc 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.

  Those wanting an easy way to test the 0.60.0 release with uClibc can use User-Mode Linux to give it a try by downloading and compiling buildroot.tar.gz. 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 oss.lineo.com.

  Another cool thing is the nifty BusyBox Tutorial contributed by K Computing. This requires a ShockWave plugin (or standalone viewer), so you may want to grab the the GPLed shockwave viewer from here to view the tutorial.

  Finally, In case you didn't notice anything odd about the version number of this release, let me point out that this release is not 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.

  The changelog has all the details. As usual BusyBox 0.60.0 can be downloaded from ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox.

  Have Fun!

- 7 July 2001 -- BusyBox 0.52 released
  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 many 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).

  The changelog 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 ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox.

  Have Fun!

- 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.)

- Old News
  For the old news, visit the old news page.

Download

- Source for the latest release can always be downloaded from ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox.
- A new snapshot of the source is made daily and is available as a GNU gzipped tarball right here.
- BusyBox now has its own publically browsable CVS tree, anonymous CVS access, and for those that are actively contributing there is even CVS write access.

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.

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.

- 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.

- Other cool embedded software.

- opensource.lineo.com.

- Lineo is sponsoring BusyBox development.

Products/Projects Using BusyBox

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:

- Lineo Embedix Linux
- Debian installer (boot floppies) project
- Linux Router Project
- LEM
- tomsrtbt
- Stormix Installer
- EMAC Linux 2.0 SBC
- Trinux
- ODDAS project
- The Kerbango Internet Radio
- LinuxMagic VPN Firewall
- Build Your Linux Disk
- BasicLinux
- Zdisk
- AdTran - VPN/firewall VPN Linux Distribution
- mkCDrec - make CD-ROM recovery
- Linux on nanoEngine
- Floppyfw
- Midori Linux - Article on Midori Linux on Wired. Quote from Erik at the top of this page
- Linux Terminal Server Project
- Devil-Linux

Do you use BusyBox? I'd love to know about it and I'd be happy to link to you.

Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to Erik Andersen The Busybox logo is copyright 1999,2000,2001, Erik Andersen. |  |  |  |  |