Busybox - Are there easy ways to make it more robust?

[ericglam]

I am not sure if this is a  Zaurus Linux 101 refresher question or a question about the philosophy of the compromises in Busybox. 60.4  in the Sharp SL-5600 ROM.  What are people doing when they find the version of Busybox on the Zaurus too stripped down to be comfortable?

It looks like there are some older versions of Busybox with more features. If one of these is newly installed on the Zaurus, are the links automatically created or set to the wanted version of Busybox, or do you have to link Busybox and each command individually with a script?  What if it is only certain commands where you need flexibility such as this combination command: find  / -type f –exec grep –H filename {} ;   that will not work on the Zaurus?

Are people recompiling Busybox for their own purposes (seems like a lot of work) or are there easier ways to install and substitute more full-bodied commands as you need them?

Also usage aids for Busybox commands seems lacking on the Zaurus.  Man pages , info , whatis, --help, etc.. don’t exist.    So you must force an error to see what options and parameters can be used.  http://www.busybox.net/ seems to be describing a much more robust product than on the Zaurus.

[lardman]

People generally re-compile it. I think you can specify during the configure process how much should be stripped away. The busybox which the Sharp ROMs use is probably a bit old now. That said you could just compile each command and place it on your Z in place of the appropriate symlink.

Yes a script is needed to (re)create the symlinks to point to the correct busybox binary - take a look at the (now also rather old) busybox update on killefiz and look at what it does.

$ command --help usually produces something (a list of switches) but some more description would be nice sometimes. You could always download the html page which describes all of the switches and use that on your Z. It would save space which is the main goal here.

Si

[dtruchan]

You can find a full version of find here

More arm utils here

With OZ 3.3.6, I use packages from here.

[doseas]

What are people doing when they find the version of Busybox on the Zaurus too stripped down to be comfortable?

I usually try to find full-featured replacements for common or missing commands, already compiled for the ARM processor.  One good source is the Debian ARM distribution:
http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

[ericglam]

I usually try to find full-featured replacements for common or missing commands

Thanks for the help: This is very useful.  

I have decided to follow doesas’s advice and find full-featured replacements on an ad hock basis for common or missing commands.

The find utilities recommended by dtruchan worked great.  

The replacements that I finding, besides being more robust, seem to work much much faster than the commands in Busybox.  Is this the norm?

Now if I can only find a version of dpkg that has list and search features…

[doseas]

Now if I can only find a version of dpkg that has list and search features…

By \"list\", do you mean to list contents of a .deb file??  If so, this command does that on the Zaurus:
dpkg-deb -c filename.deb

[ericglam]

doesas wrote

By \"list\", do you mean to list contents of a .deb file?? 

I want to see where packages are going.  The following is what I would like:

dpkg -l “package_name\" will tell you the status of \"package_name\" or if you don\'t enter anything for \"package_name\", it will tell you the status of all installed packages.\"

dpkg -L “package_name\" will tell you all of the files that belong to package_name\".\"

dpkg -s [ wildcard ] – search all installed,  files and the packages and tell what belongs to to who.

I have harldy ever used the dpkg-deb command except with the -x option