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View Full Version : What's so special about Busy Box Linux? Why do routers often use this OS?


kevdog
July 2nd, 2008, 04:05 AM
Just trying to figure out why a lot of smaller appliances running linux run the Busy Box OS variant -- many routers for example use this as their OS. Are there other competitors? I never see Busy Box listed on Distro Watch.
LaRoza
July 2nd, 2008, 04:08 AM
Just trying to figure out why a lot of smaller appliances running linux run the Busy Box OS variant -- many routers for example use this as their OS. Are there other competitors? I never see Busy Box listed on Distro Watch.

It is basically just a set of tools, like the GNU Core Utilities, but smaller.
Lostincyberspace
July 2nd, 2008, 04:09 AM
Busy box is in everything Linux (even Ubuntu trust me I am having problems with it right now.) I believe it is part of the kernel.
kevdog
July 2nd, 2008, 04:11 AM
Is there a specific busy box distro -- or somewhere I could simply download this set of tools? What is it? a stripped down kernel?
LaRoza
July 2nd, 2008, 04:14 AM
Is there a specific busy box distro -- or somewhere I could simply download this set of tools? What is it? a stripped down kernel?

http://busybox.net/FAQ.html
macogw
July 2nd, 2008, 06:08 AM
Busy box is just a shell that runs on top of the kernel, like korn, bash, sh, tcsh, zsh, etc. except extremely basic.
p_quarles
July 2nd, 2008, 06:33 AM
It's built into most distros. The help message on my box:

BusyBox v1.9.2 (Debian 1:1.9.2-3) multi-call binary
Copyright (C) 1998-2007 Erik Andersen, Rob Landley, Denys Vlasenko
and others. Licensed under GPLv2.
See source distribution for full notice.

Usage: busybox [function] [arguments]...
or: function [arguments]...

BusyBox is a multi-call binary that combines many common Unix
utilities into a single executable. Most people will create a
link to busybox for each function they wish to use and BusyBox
will act like whatever it was invoked as!

Currently defined functions:
[, [[, adjtimex, arping, ash, awk, basename, bunzip2, bzcat, bzip2, cal, cat, chgrp,
chmod, chown, chroot, chvt, clear, cmp, cp, cpio, cut, date, dc, dd, deallocvt, df, dirname,
dmesg, dos2unix, du, dumpkmap, echo, egrep, env, expr, false, fgrep, find, fold, free,
ftpget, ftpput, getopt, grep, gunzip, gzip, head, hexdump, hostid, hostname, httpd, id,
ifconfig, ip, ipcalc, kill, killall, klogd, last, length, ln, loadfont, loadkmap, logger,
logname, logread, losetup, ls, lzmacat, md5sum, mkdir, mkfifo, mknod, mktemp, more, mount,
mt, mv, nameif, nc, netstat, nslookup, od, openvt, patch, pidof, ping, ping6, printf,
ps, pwd, rdate, readlink, realpath, renice, reset, rm, rmdir, route, rpm, rpm2cpio, run-parts,
sed, setkeycodes, sh, sha1sum, sleep, sort, start-stop-daemon, strings, stty, swapoff,
swapon, sync, sysctl, syslogd, tail, tar, tee, telnet, test, tftp, time, top, touch,
tr, traceroute, true, tty, umount, uname, uncompress, uniq, unix2dos, unlzma, unzip,
uptime, usleep, uudecode, uuencode, vi, watch, watchdog, wc, wget, which, who, whoami,
xargs, yes, zcat