Don’t forget Busybox

[Member PDP-8]

Most Debian based distros these days include busybox, which fortunately got upgraded to a fresher version, although it isn’t the latest obviously.

If you run busybox without any arguments, you’ll see all the utilities compiled into it by the distro maintainer.

You might find things of interest, like lightweight versions of vi, minicom, httpd, rpm – the list goes on.

While there is a whole groove of how to use busybox, the simplest is to just call it by name. Ie, if you find Vim too heavyweight for your needs, a simple vi alternative could be called up simply by

busybox vi

One could actually put this into a single file shell script – I named my shell script “bvi” and use it that way. Many ways to use busybox are online.

Maybe someday I’ll try to see if I can convert antiX “core” to be a busybox-only kind of thing and see how far I can go. Since I’m not a programmer, that will be a back-burner project. 🙂

[Member fatmac]

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Busybox is a program that can replace all the basic Linux utils, (you should basically be able to just use it with a kernel & boot loader), there are a few distros out there that use it as their base. (Tinycore, Alpine, SliTaz, etc.).

https://busybox.net/products.html

https://revcode.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/booting-a-minimal-busybox-based-linux-distro/

Good luck with your experiments. 🙂

Linux (& BSD) since 1999

[Member PDP-8]

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Thanks – For now if I want to play I just put BB at the head of my path, create the symlinks, but wholesale replacement is tricky for me making sure that init and related boot time scripting works if I want to go that far down the trail.

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