EBC BusyBox

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...