Other Essential Binaries

While Busybox offers us many essential Unix utilities, we still miss a few essential programs for our mission. We cannot partition a hard disk and we cannot create or repair ext2 file systems. Busybox can be made to include mkfs and fsck for Minix file systems, but not for the much more common Ext2 file system. Both util-linx and e2fsprogs complain if you had not built uClibc with large file support.

First start another shell and type the following command:

export PATH=/home/lennartb/myboot/uclibc-dev/bin:$PATH

From now on, the uClibc version of gcc will be used instead of the normal version.

For now we need util-linux only for the fdisk utility. The build procedure is as follows:

• cd into the util-linux source directory.
• Edit the MCONFIG file as follows:
  • Change the CPU line near the top of the file to CPU=i386.
  • Add another line to the large CFLAGS statement near the bottom of the file:

          -D__NO_CTYPE \
    

    This line must look like the other lines in the same statement, including the backslash with a space before it and nothing after it. ¹
• Run make.
• Make stops with an error while trying to build mount. We already have a mount in busybox, so we leave it that way.
• cd into the fdisk directory.
• Run make.
• Move the file fdisk to the directory
  /home/lennartb/myboot/roofts/sbin.

Now we will build e2fsprogs as follows:

• Create a directory named build under the e2fsprogs source directory and cd to it.
• Configure and build the programs: ²

  ./configure
  make BUILD_CC=/usr/bin/gcc
  

• Strip and move e2fsck and mke2fs to the rootfs directory.

  strip e2fsck/e2fsck.shared
  mv e2fsck/e2fsck.shared \
    /home/lennartb/myboot/rootfs/sbin/e2fsck
  strip mke2fs
  mv misc/mke2fs /home/lennartb/myboot/rootfs/sbin
  

This is the time to build any other programs you will need. Link them with uClibc and move them to the one of the binary subdirectories in the myboot/rootfs directory. If linking with uClibc does not work, try to link statically using the ordinary gcc.