# BusyBox

BUSYBOX

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 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.

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.

Sponsors

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!

- Penguru Consulting
  Custom development for embedded Linux systems and multimedia platforms
- opensource.se
  Embedded open source consulting in Europe.
- http://i-netinnovations.com/
  Web hosting (currently hosting busybox.net and uclibc.org)
- Codepoet Consulting
  Custom Linux, embedded Linux, BusyBox, and uClibc development.

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.

Download

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.

- Daily Snapshots of the the latest stable, and the latest development CVS source trees can be found right here.
- Click here to browse the CVS tree for the development version of BusyBox
- Click here to browse the CVS tree for the stable 0.60.x version of BusyBox.
- Anonymous CVS access is available.
- 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.
- 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.

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:

- Debian installer (boot floppies) project
- Red Hat 7.2 installer
- Slackware Installer
- Gentoo Linux install/boot CDs
- The Mandrake installer
- 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
- DutNux
- Mindi
- ttylinux
- Coyote Linux
- Partition Image
- fli4l the on(e)-disk-router
- Tuxscreen Linux Phone
- Tinfoil Hat Linux
- Sharp Zaurus PDA
- Familiar Linux - a linux distribution for handheld computers
- Timo's Rescue CD Set
- Netstation
- I-Silver Linux appliance servers
- GNU/Fiwix Operating System
- Cyclades-TS and other Cyclades products
- Generations Linux
- SystemImager / System Installation Suite
- GENDIST distribution generator
- DIET-PC embedded Linux thin client distribution
- BYZantine Gnu/Linux
- Darik's Boot and Nuke
- TimeSys real-time Linux
- MoviX -- boots from CD and automatically plays every video file on the CD
- Linux, X11, xfce windowmanager, based on BusyBox

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 1999-2002, Erik Andersen. |  |  |  |  |