{"id":89,"date":"2006-01-09T18:45:01","date_gmt":"2006-01-09T23:45:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/?p=89"},"modified":"2006-01-09T18:45:01","modified_gmt":"2006-01-09T23:45:01","slug":"busybox-on-the-770","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/2006\/01\/09\/busybox-on-the-770\/","title":{"rendered":"Busybox on the 770"},"content":{"rendered":"

Busybox is your gateway to exploring the 770. It’s called “The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux” for good reason. When you login to the 770 and use the CLI (or shell) what you are using is Busybox. Traditional Unix machines uses many small programs (most often the GNU toolset<\/a>) for most common tasks. Almost all small handheld devices with limited resources (RAM) use this one application which emulates all those small programs. Using Busybox is much smaller in terms of a memory footprint that all those other apps. Busybox on the 770 is only 272k.<\/p>\n

To learn more about Busybox, visit its home page<\/a>. They have a wonderful page with every command that is possible<\/a> with a full build of Busybox. The Busybox in the 770 doesn’t implement all of these commands however. The full list of what you have available to you on the 770 is available by executing Busybox by itself:\n<\/p>\n

Nokia770-51:~# busybox\nBusyBox v1.00 (Debian 2:20041102-11) multi-call binary\n\nUsage: busybox [function] [arguments]...\n   or: [function] [arguments]...\n\n        BusyBox is a multi-call binary that combines many common Unix\n        utilities into a single executable.  Most people will create a\n        link to busybox for each function they wish to use, and BusyBox\n        will act like whatever it was invoked as.\n\nCurrently defined functions:\n        [, ash, basename, busybox, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, chvt,\n        clear, cmp, cp, cut, date, dd, df, dirname, dmesg, du, echo, egrep,\n        env, expr, false, fgrep, find, free, getty, grep, gunzip, gzip, head,\n        hostname, id, ifconfig, ifdown, ifup, insmod, kill, killall, ln, logger,\n        login, ls, lsmod, mkdir, mkfifo, mknod, mkswap, mktemp, modprobe,\n        more, mount, mv, netstat, nslookup, pivot_root, printf, ps, pwd, realpath,\n        renice, reset, rm, rmdir, rmmod, route, run-parts, sed, seq, sh, sleep,\n        sort, stty, su, swapoff, swapon, sync, tail, tar, tee, test, time,\n        top, touch, tr, true, tty, umount, uname, uniq, uptime, wc, which,\n        who, whoami, xargs, yes, zcat\n<\/pre>\n
To see how much Busybox does take a look at \/bin and \/usr\/bin. Almost all the programs in \/bin are just links to the Busybox binary.\n<\/p>\n
Pesky Swap<\/b>\n<\/p>\n
One thing I’m doing is investigating using swap with the .51 firmware. I still get out of memory errors when I swapon my little 32M swap partition on the MMC card. Once I’ve activated swap I can’t load any applications– and if I have something running (say the browser) the device will reboot.\n<\/p>\n
I’m tracking what is happening by running this small script:<\/p>\n
# while true; do\n> cat \/proc\/meminfo\n> echo '----------------'\n> sleep 2\n> done\n<\/pre>\n
Which spits out stats similar to these:<\/p>\n
MemTotal:        61828 kB\nMemFree:          5916 kB\nBuffers:           112 kB\nCached:          27556 kB\nSwapCached:          0 kB\nActive:          24296 kB\nInactive:        16624 kB\nHighTotal:           0 kB\nHighFree:            0 kB\nLowTotal:        61828 kB\nLowFree:          5916 kB\nSwapTotal:       32728 kB\nSwapFree:        32728 kB\nDirty:               0 kB\nWriteback:           0 kB\nMapped:          25936 kB\nSlab:             6692 kB\nCommitLimit:     63640 kB\nCommitted_AS:    36728 kB\nPageTables:       1140 kB\nVmallocTotal:   188416 kB\nVmallocUsed:       640 kB\nVmallocChunk:   187776 kB\n<\/pre>\n
And by watching the output I see that my swap is never used by the 770! So while I’m not sure what is going on with this, I’m continuing to poke around the 770.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Busybox is your gateway to exploring the 770. It’s called “The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux” for good reason. When you login to the 770 and use the CLI (or shell) what you are using is Busybox. Traditional Unix machines uses many small programs (most often the GNU toolset) for most common tasks. Almost […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nokia-770","category-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3PE01-1r","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":84,"url":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/2005\/12\/27\/making-swap\/","url_meta":{"origin":89,"position":0},"title":"Making Swap","author":"admin","date":"December 27, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"In my quest to speed up the 770 (I think that by loading my bookmarks and RSS feeds I've crushed it- it's just so slow now that it's mostly unusable) I ran across a link in the comments here to a post on the users list about enabling swap on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Nokia 770"","block_context":{"text":"Nokia 770","link":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/category\/nokia-770\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":74,"url":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/2005\/12\/11\/go-root\/","url_meta":{"origin":89,"position":1},"title":"Go Root","author":"admin","date":"December 11, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"I feel like it's time to enable root on my 770. I want to setup some things and its hard looking around and searching for things without having access to everything. Fortunately, getting root is super simple on the 770. The MaemoWiki has an excellent page on it, but if\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Nokia 770"","block_context":{"text":"Nokia 770","link":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/category\/nokia-770\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":87,"url":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/2006\/01\/01\/what-happened-in-51\/","url_meta":{"origin":89,"position":2},"title":"What Happened in .51?","author":"admin","date":"January 1, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Issues with 51 Ok, since I've flashed 51 onto my 770, all hell has broken loose. So far I've had these issues: News Reader won't load (and it constantly refreshes) Sporadic reboots Out of Memory errors (I never had them before) Using swapon causes immediate out of memory and or\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Nokia 770"","block_context":{"text":"Nokia 770","link":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/category\/nokia-770\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":72,"url":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/2005\/12\/10\/rss-on-nokia-770\/","url_meta":{"origin":89,"position":3},"title":"RSS on Nokia 770","author":"admin","date":"December 10, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"So I just got my 770 yesterday, and it seems to be as good as I had imagined. I've installed some cool stuff, and am using it as I planned- as a replacement for my laptop around the house when I just want to surf and read the web and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Nokia 770"","block_context":{"text":"Nokia 770","link":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/category\/nokia-770\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"770-feedlist-editing.png","src":"\/apple\/wp-content\/images\/770-feedlist-editing.png","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"\/apple\/wp-content\/images\/770-feedlist-editing.png 1x, \/apple\/wp-content\/images\/770-feedlist-editing.png 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":163,"url":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/2007\/07\/10\/size-of-iphone-vs-nokia-770\/","url_meta":{"origin":89,"position":4},"title":"Size of iPhone vs Nokia 770","author":"dillera","date":"July 10, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I took some pictures showing the size difference between the 770 and iPhone. iPhone is really is smaller than you'd first think. Unfortunately, it also has a lower resolution screen than the 770. The zoom feature makes up for that somewhat (see the last picture in this post for an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "iPhone"","block_context":{"text":"iPhone","link":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/category\/iphone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Iphone-770 1","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dillernet.com\/apple\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/07\/iphone-770-1-tm.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":82,"url":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/2005\/12\/20\/ebooks-and-the-770\/","url_meta":{"origin":89,"position":5},"title":"Ebooks and the 770","author":"admin","date":"December 20, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"I really got into reading ebooks with my Toshiba e805, one of the first PocketPCs that sported a near-VGA screen. Reading on it was pleasant and very easy on the eyes. So I've been anxious for the 770 to take over as my primary ebook device-- the beautiful screen is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Interesting"","block_context":{"text":"Interesting","link":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/category\/interesting\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"770_fbreader.png","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dillernet.com\/apple\/wp-content\/images\/770_fbreader.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dillernet.com\/apple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}