There are a number of improvements in this release as well. For one thing, the wget applet is greatly improved. Dmitry Zakharov added FTP support, and Laurence Anderson make wget fully RFC compliant for HTTP 1.1. The mechanism for including utility functions in previous releases was clumsy and error prone. Now all utility functions are part of a new libbb library, which makes maintaining utility functions much simpler. And BusyBox now compiles on itanium systems (thanks to the Debian itanium porters for letting me use their system!).

You can read the changelog for complete details. BusyBox 0.51 can be downloaded from ftp://busybox.net/busybox.

Have Fun!

Because you asked for it, we have made available a Busybox boot floppy image. Here's how you use it:

1. Download the image
2. dd it onto a floppy like so: dd if=busybox.floppy.img of=/dev/fd0 ; sync
3. Pop it in a machine and boot up.

If you want to look at the contents of the initrd image, do this:

	    mount ./busybox.floppy.img /mnt -o loop -t msdos        
	    cp /mnt/initrd.gz /tmp                          
	    umount /mnt           
	    gunzip /tmp/initrd.gz
	    mount /tmp/initrd /mnt -o loop -t minix
    

lash (the busybox shell) is still with us, fixed up a bit so it now behaves itself quite nicely. It really is quite usable as long as you don't expect it to provide Bourne shell grammer. Standard things like pipes, redirects, command line editing, and environment variable expansion work great. But we have found that this shell, while very usable, does not provide an extensible framework for adding in full Bourne shell behavior. So the first order of business as we begin working on the next BusyBox release will be to merge in the new shell currently in progress at Larry Doolittle's website.

Special thanks go out to Matt Kraai and Larry Doolittle for all their work on this release, and for keeping on top of things while I've been out of town.

Special Note
BusyBox 0.49 was supposed to have replaced lash, the BusyBox shell, with a new shell that understands full Bourne shell/Posix shell grammer. Well, that simply didn't happen in time for this release. A new shell that will eventually replace lash is already under construction. This new shell is being developed by Larry Doolittle, and could use all of our help. Please see the work in progress on Larry's website and help out if you can. This shell will be included in the next release of BusyBox.

The curious can get a list of some of the more interesting changes by reading the changelog.

Many thanks go out to the many many people that have contributed to this release, especially Matt Kraai, Larry Doolittle, and Kent Robotti.

Also, some exciting infrastructure news! Busybox now has its own mailing list, publically browsable CVS tree, anonymous CVS access, and for those that are actively contributing there is even CVS write access. I think this will be a huge help to the ongoing development of BusyBox.

Also, for the curious, there is no 0.44 release. Somehow 0.44 got announced a few weeks ago prior to its actually being released. To avoid any confusion we are just skipping 0.44.

Many thanks go out to the many people that have contributed to this release of BusyBox (esp. Pavel Roskin)!

	#include <syslog.h>

	int do_log(char* msg, int delay)
	{
	    openlog("testlog", LOG_PID, LOG_DAEMON);
	    while(1) {
	        syslog(LOG_ERR, "%s: testing one, two, three\n", msg);
	        sleep(delay);
	    }
	    closelog();
	    return(0);
	};

	int main(void)
	{
	    if (fork()==0)
	        do_log("A", 2);
	    do_log("B", 3);
	}

Karl M. Hegbloom has created a fix for the problem. Thanks Karl!

Many thanks go out to the fine people that have helped by submitting patches and bug reports; particularly instrumental in helping for this release were Karl Hegbloom, Pavel Roskin, Friedrich Vedder, Emanuele Caratti, Bob Tinsley, Nicolas Pitre, Avery Pennarun, Arne Bernin, John Beppu, and Jim Gleason. There were others so if I somehow forgot to mention you, I'm very sorry.

You can grab BusyBox 0.43 tarballs here.

The pre-release can be found here. Please let me know ASAP if you find any bugs.

Anyway, I'm glad to note that despite the much-faster-than-we-were-expecting labor, both Shaunalei and our new baby boy are doing wonderfully.

So now that I am done with my excuse for the slow release cycle... Progress on the next release of BusyBox has been slow but steady. I expect to have a release sometime during the first week of April. This release will include a number of important changes, including the addition of a shell, a re-write of tar (to accommodate the Linux Router Project), and syslogd can now accept multiple concurrent connections, fixing lots of unexpected blocking problems.