EBC BusyBox

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thumb‎ Embedded Linux Class by Mark A. Yoder


BusyBox bills itself as "The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux". It combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. Here you'll learn how to download, configure and compile BusyBox.

Getting BusyBox

You can compile BusyBox on either the Bone or your host. I'll use the Bone here.

downloading

Get the BusyBox sources from the git repo.

bone$ git clone git://busybox.net/busybox.git
bone$ cd busybox

compiling

bone$ make help
bone$ make defconfig  (takes 45 seconds)

configuring and compiling

You can now configure BusyBox (In the event that none of the graphical tools work you can use "make config" to use the text based tool as a method of last resort). First be sure you have the graphics libraries loaded.

bone$ make menuconfig
bone$ apt-get install libncurses5-dev

or

bone$ apt-get install libglade2-dev
bone$ make gconfig

After saving the configuration changes to update the .config file, it is a simple matter of running make.

bone$ make -j2       # use -jX for X-1 cores

My make took about 10 minutes on the Bone and 1.5 minutes on the host to compile (25 seconds with make -j8!).

installing

Just typing ./busybox will tell you what commands it knows. Try some of them.

beagle$ busybox
beagle$ ./busybox
beagle$ ./busybox ls

What's the difference between running busybox and ./busybox? Try some other commands...




thumb‎ Embedded Linux Class by Mark A. Yoder