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28<!-- Begin Older News section -->
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30<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
31 <A NAME="news">
32 <BIG><B>
33 Older BusyBox News</A>
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36</TD></TR>
37<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
38
39<ul>
40
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]41 <p> <li> <b>Take me back to the <a href="http://busybox.net/">BusyBox</a> web site.</b>
Eric Andersen766c0122000-06-21 22:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]42 <hr>
43
Eric Andersenceece812001-07-07 09:38:30 +0000[diff] [blame]44 <li> <b>10 April 2001 -- BusyBox 0.51 released</b>
45 <br>
46
47 BusyBox 0.51 (the "rock-solid release") is now out there. This
48 release adds only 2 new applets: env and vi. The vi applet,
49 contributed by Sterling Huxley, is very functional, and is only
50 22k. This release fixes 3 critical bugs in the 0.50 release.
51 There were 2 potential segfaults in lash (the busybox shell) in
52 the 0.50 release which are now fixed. Another critical bug in
53 0.50 which is now fixed: syslogd from 0.50 could potentially
54 deadlock the init process and thereby break your entire system.
55 <p>
56
57 There are a number of improvements in this release as well. For
58 one thing, the wget applet is greatly improved. Dmitry Zakharov
59 added FTP support, and Laurence Anderson make wget fully RFC
60 compliant for HTTP 1.1. The mechanism for including utility
61 functions in previous releases was clumsy and error prone. Now
62 all utility functions are part of a new libbb library, which makes
63 maintaining utility functions much simpler. And BusyBox now
64 compiles on itanium systems (thanks to the Debian itanium porters
65 for letting me use their system!).
66 <p>
67 You can read the
Eric Andersen5a841ad2001-12-20 08:04:56 +0000[diff] [blame^]68 <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a> for
Eric Andersenceece812001-07-07 09:38:30 +0000[diff] [blame]69 complete details. BusyBox 0.51 can be downloaded from
Eric Andersen5a841ad2001-12-20 08:04:56 +0000[diff] [blame^]70 <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads">http://busybox.net/downloads</a>.
Eric Andersenceece812001-07-07 09:38:30 +0000[diff] [blame]71 <p>Have Fun!
72 <p>
73
74 <li> <b>Busybox Boot-Floppy Image</b>
75
76 <p>Because you asked for it, we have made available a <a href=
Eric Andersen5a841ad2001-12-20 08:04:56 +0000[diff] [blame^]77 "http://busybox.net/downloads/busybox.floppy.img"> Busybox boot floppy
Eric Andersenceece812001-07-07 09:38:30 +0000[diff] [blame]78 image</a>. Here's how you use it:
79
80 <ol>
81
Eric Andersen5a841ad2001-12-20 08:04:56 +0000[diff] [blame^]82 <li> <a href= "http://busybox.net/downloads/busybox.floppy.img">
Eric Andersenceece812001-07-07 09:38:30 +0000[diff] [blame]83 Download the image</a>
84
85 <li> dd it onto a floppy like so: <tt> dd if=busybox.floppy.img
86 of=/dev/fd0 ; sync </tt>
87
88 <li> Pop it in a machine and boot up.
89
90 </ol>
91
92 <p> If you want to look at the contents of the initrd image, do this:
93
94 <pre>
95 mount ./busybox.floppy.img /mnt -o loop -t msdos
96 cp /mnt/initrd.gz /tmp
97 umount /mnt
98 gunzip /tmp/initrd.gz
99 mount /tmp/initrd /mnt -o loop -t minix
100 </pre>
101
102
Eric Andersen7b2dfc62001-07-07 08:44:25 +0000[diff] [blame]103 <li> <b>15 March 2001 -- BusyBox 0.50 released</b>
104 <br>
105
106 This release adds several new applets including ifconfig, route, pivot_root, stty,
107 and tftp, and also fixes tons of bugs. Tab completion in the
108 shell is now working very well, and the shell's environment variable
109 expansion was fixed. Tons of other things were fixed or made
110 smaller. For a fairly complete overview, see the
Eric Andersen5a841ad2001-12-20 08:04:56 +0000[diff] [blame^]111 <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a>.
Eric Andersen7b2dfc62001-07-07 08:44:25 +0000[diff] [blame]112 <p>
113 lash (the busybox shell) is still with us, fixed up a bit so it
114 now behaves itself quite nicely. It really is quite usable as
115 long as you don't expect it to provide Bourne shell grammer.
116 Standard things like pipes, redirects, command line editing, and
117 environment variable expansion work great. But we have found that
118 this shell, while very usable, does not provide an extensible
119 framework for adding in full Bourne shell behavior. So the first order of
120 business as we begin working on the next BusyBox release will be to merge in the new shell
121 currently in progress at
122 <a href="http://doolittle.faludi.com/~larry/parser.html">Larry Doolittle's website</a>.
123 <p>
124
125
126 <li> <b>27 January 2001 -- BusyBox 0.49 released</b>
127 <br>
128
129 Several new applets, lots of bug fixes, cleanups, and many smaller
130 things made nicer. Several cleanups and improvements to the shell.
131 For a list of the most interesting changes
Eric Andersen5a841ad2001-12-20 08:04:56 +0000[diff] [blame^]132 you might want to look at the <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a>.
Eric Andersen7b2dfc62001-07-07 08:44:25 +0000[diff] [blame]133 <p>
134 Special thanks go out to Matt Kraai and Larry Doolittle for all their
135 work on this release, and for keeping on top of things while I've been
136 out of town.
137 <p>
138 <em>Special Note</em><br>
139
140 BusyBox 0.49 was supposed to have replaced lash, the BusyBox
141 shell, with a new shell that understands full Bourne shell/Posix shell grammer.
142 Well, that simply didn't happen in time for this release. A new
143 shell that will eventually replace lash is already under
144 construction. This new shell is being developed by Larry
145 Doolittle, and could use all of our help. Please see the work in
146 progress on <a href="http://doolittle.faludi.com/~larry/parser.html">Larry's website</a>
147 and help out if you can. This shell will be included in the next
148 release of BusyBox.
149 <p>
150
151 <li> <b>13 December 2000 -- BusyBox 0.48 released</b>
152 <br>
153
154 This release fixes lots and lots of bugs. This has had some very
155 rigorous testing, and looks very, very clean. The usual tar
156 update of course: tar no longer breaks hardlinks, tar -xzf is
157 optionally supported, and the LRP folks will be pleased to know
158 that 'tar -X' and 'tar --exclude' are both now in. Applets are
159 now looked up using a binary search making lash (the busybox
160 shell) much faster. For the new debian-installer (for Debian
161 woody) a .udeb can now be generated.
162 <p>
163 The curious can get a list of some of the more interesting changes by reading
Eric Andersen5a841ad2001-12-20 08:04:56 +0000[diff] [blame^]164 the <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a>.
Eric Andersen7b2dfc62001-07-07 08:44:25 +0000[diff] [blame]165 <p>
166 Many thanks go out to the many many people that have contributed to
167 this release, especially Matt Kraai, Larry Doolittle, and Kent Robotti.
168 <p>
Eric Andersen8ec10a92001-01-27 09:33:39 +0000[diff] [blame]169 <p> <li> <b>26 September 2000 -- BusyBox 0.47 released</b>
170 <br>
171
172 This release fixes lots of bugs (including an ugly bug in 0.46
173 syslogd that could fork-bomb your system). Added several new
174 apps: rdate, wget, getopt, dos2unix, unix2dos, reset, unrpm,
175 renice, xargs, and expr. syslogd now supports network logging.
176 There are the usual tar updates. Most apps now use getopt for
177 more correct option parsing.
Eric Andersen5a841ad2001-12-20 08:04:56 +0000[diff] [blame^]178 See the <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a>
Eric Andersen8ec10a92001-01-27 09:33:39 +0000[diff] [blame]179 for complete details.
180
181
Eric Andersen43622002000-12-13 18:30:13 +0000[diff] [blame]182 <p> <li> <b>11 July 2000 -- BusyBox 0.46 released</b>
183 <br>
184
185 This release fixes several bugs (including a ugly bug in tar,
186 and fixes for NFSv3 mount support). Added a dumpkmap to allow
187 people to dump a binary keymaps for use with 'loadkmap', and a
188 completely reworked 'grep' and 'sed' which should behave better.
189 BusyBox shell can now also be used as a login shell.
Eric Andersen5a841ad2001-12-20 08:04:56 +0000[diff] [blame^]190 See the <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a>
Eric Andersen43622002000-12-13 18:30:13 +0000[diff] [blame]191 for complete details.
192
193
194 <p> <li> <b>21 June 2000 -- BusyBox 0.45 released</b>
195 <br>
196
197 This release has been slow in coming, but is very solid at this
198 point. BusyBox now supports libc5 as well as GNU libc. This
199 release provides the following new apps: cut, tr, insmod, ar,
200 mktemp, setkeycodes, md5sum, uuencode, uudecode, which, and
201 telnet. There are bug fixes for just about every app as well (see
Eric Andersen5a841ad2001-12-20 08:04:56 +0000[diff] [blame^]202 the <a href="http://busybox.net/downloads/Changelog">changelog</a> for
Eric Andersen43622002000-12-13 18:30:13 +0000[diff] [blame]203 details).
204 <p>
205 Also, some exciting infrastructure news! Busybox now has its own
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]206 <a href="http://busybox.net/lists/busybox/">mailing list</a>,
Eric Andersen43622002000-12-13 18:30:13 +0000[diff] [blame]207 publically browsable
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]208 <a href="http://busybox.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb/busybox/">CVS tree</a>,
Eric Andersen43622002000-12-13 18:30:13 +0000[diff] [blame]209 anonymous
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]210 <a href="http://busybox.net/cvs_anon.html">CVS access</a>, and
Eric Andersen43622002000-12-13 18:30:13 +0000[diff] [blame]211 for those that are actively contributing there is even
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]212 <a href="http://busybox.net/cvs_write.html">CVS write access</a>.
Eric Andersen43622002000-12-13 18:30:13 +0000[diff] [blame]213 I think this will be a huge help to the ongoing development of BusyBox.
214 <p>
215 Also, for the curious, there is no 0.44 release. Somehow 0.44 got announced
216 a few weeks ago prior to its actually being released. To avoid any confusion
217 we are just skipping 0.44.
218 <p>
219 Many thanks go out to the many people that have contributed to this release
220 of BusyBox (esp. Pavel Roskin)!
221
222
Eric Andersen766c0122000-06-21 22:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]223 <p> <li> <b>19 April 2000 -- syslogd bugfix</b>
224 <br>
225 Turns out that there was still a bug in busybox syslogd.
226 For example, with the following test app:
227<pre>
228 #include &lt;syslog.h&gt;
229
230 int do_log(char* msg, int delay)
231 {
232 openlog("testlog", LOG_PID, LOG_DAEMON);
233 while(1) {
234 syslog(LOG_ERR, "%s: testing one, two, three\n", msg);
235 sleep(delay);
236 }
237 closelog();
238 return(0);
239 };
240
241 int main(void)
242 {
243 if (fork()==0)
244 do_log("A", 2);
245 do_log("B", 3);
246 }
247</pre>
248 it should be logging stuff from both "A" and "B". As released in 0.43 only stuff
249 from "A" would have been logged. This means that if init tries to log something
250 while say ppp has the syslog open, init would block (which is bad, bad, bad).
251 <p>
252 Karl M. Hegbloom has created a
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]253 <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/busybox-0.43-syslog_patch">fix for the problem</a>.
Eric Andersen766c0122000-06-21 22:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]254 Thanks Karl!
255
256
257 <p> <li> <b>18 April 2000 -- BusyBox 0.43 released (finally!)</b>
258 <br>
259 I have finally gotten everything into a state where I feel pretty
260 good about things. This is definitely the most stable, solid release
261 so far. A lot of bugs have been fixed, and the following new apps
262 have been added: sh, basename, dirname, killall, uptime,
263 freeramdisk, tr, echo, test, and usleep. Tar has been completely
264 rewritten from scratch. Bss size has also been greatly reduced.
265 More details are available in the
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]266 <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a>.
Eric Andersen766c0122000-06-21 22:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]267 Oh, and as a special bonus, I wrote some fairly comprehensive
268 <em>documentation</em>, complete with examples and full usage information.
269
270 <p>
271 Many thanks go out to the fine people that have helped by submitting patches
272 and bug reports; particularly instrumental in helping for this release were
273 Karl Hegbloom, Pavel Roskin, Friedrich Vedder, Emanuele Caratti,
274 Bob Tinsley, Nicolas Pitre, Avery Pennarun, Arne Bernin, John Beppu, and Jim Gleason.
275 There were others so if I somehow forgot to mention you, I'm very sorry.
276 <p>
277
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]278 You can grab BusyBox 0.43 tarballs <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/">here</a>.
Eric Andersen766c0122000-06-21 22:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]279
280 <p> <li> <b>9 April 2000 -- BusyBox 0.43 pre release</b>
281 <br>
282 Unfortunately, I have not yet finished all the things I want to
283 do for BusyBox 0.43, so I am posting this pre-release for people
284 to poke at. This contains my complete rewrite of tar, which now weighs in at
285 5k (7k with all options turned on) and works for reading and writing
286 tarballs (which it does correctly for everything I have been able to throw
287 at it). Tar also (optionally) supports the "--exclude" option (mainly because
288 the Linux Router Project folks asked for it). This also has a pre-release
289 of the micro shell I have been writing. This pre-release should be stable
290 enough for production use -- it just isn't a release since I have some structural
291 changes I still want to make.
292 <p>
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]293 The pre-release can be found <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/">here</a>.
Eric Andersen766c0122000-06-21 22:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]294 Please let me know ASAP if you find <em>any</em> bugs.
295
296 <p> <li> <b>28 March 2000 -- Andersen Baby Boy release</b>
297 <br>
298 I am pleased to announce that on Tuesday March 28th at 5:48pm, weighing in at 7
299 lbs. 12 oz, Micah Erik Andersen was born at LDS Hospital here in Salt Lake City.
300 He was born in the emergency room less then 5 minutes after we arrived -- and
301 it was such a relief that we even made it to the hospital at all. Despite the
302 fact that I was driving at an amazingly unlawful speed and honking at everybody
303 and thinking decidedly unkind thoughts about the people in our way, my wife
304 (inconsiderate of my feelings and complete lack of medical training) was lying
305 down in the back seat saying things like "I think I need to start pushing now"
306 (which she then proceeded to do despite my best encouraging statements to the
307 contrary).
308 <p>
309 Anyway, I'm glad to note that despite the much-faster-than-we-were-expecting
310 labor, both Shaunalei and our new baby boy are doing wonderfully.
311 <p>
312 So now that I am done with my excuse for the slow release cycle...
313 Progress on the next release of BusyBox has been slow but steady. I expect
314 to have a release sometime during the first week of April. This release will
315 include a number of important changes, including the addition of a shell, a
316 re-write of tar (to accommodate the Linux Router Project), and syslogd can now
317 accept multiple concurrent connections, fixing lots of unexpected blocking
318 problems.
319
320
321 <p> <li> <b>11 February 2000 -- BusyBox 0.42 released</b>
322 <br>
323
324 This is the most solid BusyBox release so far. Many, many
325 bugs have been fixed. See the
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]326 <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">changelog</a> for details.
Eric Andersen766c0122000-06-21 22:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]327
328 Of particular interest, init will now cleanly unmount
329 filesystems on reboot, cp and mv have been rewritten and
330 behave much better, and mount and umount no longer leak
331 loop devices. Many thanks go out to Randolph Chung,
332 Karl M. Hegbloom, Taketoshi Sano, and Pavel Roskin for
333 their hard work on this release of BusyBox. Please pound
334 on it and let me know if you find any bugs.
335
336 <p> <li> <b>19 January 2000 -- BusyBox 0.41 released</b>
337 <br>
338
339 This release includes bugfixes to cp, mv, logger, true, false,
340 mkdir, syslogd, and init. New apps include wc, hostid,
341 logname, tty, whoami, and yes. New features include loop device
342 support in mount and umount, and better TERM handling by init.
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]343 The changelog can be found <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
Eric Andersen766c0122000-06-21 22:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]344
345 <p> <li> <b>7 January 2000 -- BusyBox 0.40 released</b>
346 <br>
347
348 This release includes bugfixes to init (now includes inittab support),
349 syslogd, head, logger, du, grep, cp, mv, sed, dmesg, ls, kill, gunzip, and mknod.
350 New apps include sort, uniq, lsmod, rmmod, fbset, and loadacm.
351 In particular, this release fixes an important bug in tar which
352 in some cases produced serious security problems.
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]353 As always, the changelog can be found <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
Eric Andersen766c0122000-06-21 22:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]354
355 <p> <li> <b>11 December 1999 -- BusyBox Website</b>
356 <br>
357 I have received permission from Bruce Perens (the original author of BusyBox)
358 to set up this site as the new primary website for BusyBox. This website
359 will always contain pointers to the latest and greatest, and will also
360 contain the latest documentation on how to use BusyBox, what it can do,
361 what arguments its apps support, etc.
362
363 <p> <li> <b>10 December 1999 -- BusyBox 0.39 released</b>
364 <br>
365 This release includes fixes to init, reboot, halt, kill, and ls, and contains
366 the new apps ping, hostname, mkfifo, free, tail, du, tee, and head. A full
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]367 changelog can be found <a href="ftp://busybox.net/pub/busybox/Changelog">here</a>.
Eric Andersen766c0122000-06-21 22:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]368 <p> <li> <b>5 December 1999 -- BusyBox 0.38 released</b>
369 <br>
370 This release includes fixes to tar, cat, ls, dd, rm, umount, find, df,
371 and make install, and includes new apps syslogd/klogd and logger.
372</ul>
373
374
375<!-- Begin Links section -->
376
377<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#ccccc0" ALIGN=center>
378 <A NAME="links">
379 <BIG><B>
380 Important Links</A>
381 </B></BIG>
382 </A>
383</TD></TR>
384<TR><TD BGCOLOR="#eeeee0">
385
386<ul>
387
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]388 <li> <a href="http://busybox.net/">Take me back to http://busybox.net/</a>.
Eric Andersen766c0122000-06-21 22:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]389 <p>
390
391 <li> <A HREF="http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/">
392 Free Software from Bruce Perens</A><br>
393 The original idea for BusyBox, and all versions up to 0.26 were written
394 by <A HREF="mailto:bruce@perens.com">Bruce Perens</a>. This is his BusyBox website.
395 <p>
396
397 <li> <A HREF="http://freshmeat.net/appindex/1999/04/11/923859921.html">
398 Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox</A>
399 <p>
400
Eric Andersen2423b122001-12-08 01:56:15 +0000[diff] [blame]401 <li> <a href="http://busybox.net/software.html">Cool embedded software</a>.
Eric Andersen766c0122000-06-21 22:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]402 <p>
403
404</ul>
405
406
407<!-- End of Table -->
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421 Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to
Eric Andersenbdfd0d72001-10-24 05:00:29 +0000[diff] [blame]422 <a href="mailto:andersen@codepoet.org">Erik Andersen</a><BR>
423 The Busybox logo is copyright 1999,2000,2001 Erik Andersen.
Eric Andersen766c0122000-06-21 22:43:07 +0000[diff] [blame]424 </font>
425 </TD>
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