BusyBox 1.26.0 is now available for public testing

Dec 20, 2016 22:28 GMT  ·  By

Today, December 20, 2016, the development team behind well-known BusyBox software suite, which consists of a collection of numerous common UNIX utilities used for system administration tasks, released BusyBox 1.26.0.

BusyBox 1.26.0 is an unstable build and arrives six months after the release of BusyBox 1.25.0 development version, and two and a half months after the release of BusyBox 1.25.1, the current stable version used by default in many popular Linux-based operating systems.

From the looks of it, every new unstable series marks the beginning of a new stable version. For example, BusyBox 1.24.0 landed as unstable last year on October 12, and was marked as ready for deployment in production environments two weeks later, on October 24, 2015, when BusyBox 1.24.1 arrived.

Therefore, we expect that BusyBox 1.26.1, which should be out in the coming weeks, will be the new stable version of the software project. As for BusyBox 1.26.0, it looks like it contains more than 230 changes that can be studied in the changelog attached at the end of the article.

Several of the included tools received many improvements

There are improvements for many of the bundled utilities, including but not limited to ping, wget, whois, vi, setfiles, ntpd, udhcpc, ash, lineedit, telnetd, unshare, traceroute, top, tcpsvd, tar, tc, man, less, sendmail, sed, mount, mdev, sha3sum, su, svc, ipneigh, ifplugd, hexdump, dhcp, hush, sh, cp, cpio, df, fdisk, find, awk, patch, and i2cdump.

If you plan on taking BusyBox 1.26.0 for a test drive on your GNU/Linux distribution, we invite you to download the source archive right now from our website. As soon as BusyBox 1.26.1 hits the streets, it will also be available for installation from the stable repositories of your favorite distro.

BusyBox 1.26.0 Changelog