Installing BusyBox on Desktop

If you check your desktop distro’s package manager, you may find that BusyBox is available for install.

On Ubuntu, it’s as easy as: sudo apt install busybox

But wait, doesn’t BusyBox replace lots of common Linux utilities? Won’t this overwrite them? Fortunately, it won’t. In fact, there’s a good chance it’s installed on your machine already. It’s there in the event a normal boot-up doesn’t work; many ‘safe mode’ environments use BusyBox instead of a full set of Linux utilities.

But under normal circumstances, bear in mind that while BusyBox is used as a replacement for these utilities, it doesn’t need to overwrite them. It normally requires a number of symlinks to work properly, and on Ubuntu the package’s description notes that it won’t create any of the necessary symlinks that would allow BusyBox to handle those commands.

Instead, you can install it and issue actual BusyBox commands such as: busybox ls

Overall though, there’s not a lot of reason to install it yourself. Given that you already have standalone utilities that don’t require you to prepend them with busybox , the value you’d get from installing it on a regular Linux system is negligible.