Building

You need Docker on whatever OS you use. Run docker-compose up -d, enter the container shell, and run the following commands:

make kib64u_defconfig -j$(nproc)
make -j$(nproc)

Hints

• Use forward slashes in paths: Windows doesn't mind and the shell will be happier.
• Windows paths are different from Unix (more detail):
  • Absolute paths: c:/path or //host/share/path
  • Relative to current directory of other drive: c:path
  • Relative to current root (drive or share): /path
  • Relative to current directory of current root (drive or share): path
• Handling of users, groups and permissions is totally bogus. The system only admits to knowing about the current user and employs various heuristics to synthesise uid, gid and permission values.
• Some crufty old Windows code (Windows XP, cmd.exe) doesn't like forward slashes in environment variables. The -X shell option prevents busybox-w32 from changing backslashes to forward slashes. If Windows programs don't run from the shell it's worth trying it.
• If you want to install 32-bit BusyBox in a system directory on a 64-bit version of Windows you should put it in C:\Windows\SysWOW64, not C:\Windows\System32 as you might expect. On 64-bit systems the latter is for 64-bit binaries.
• The system tries to detect the best way to handle the terminal being used. If this doesn't work you can try setting the environment variable BB_TERMINAL_MODE=1 to force the use of literal ANSI escapes or BB_TERMINAL_MODE=0 to emulate them using the Windows console API.
• busybox-w32 prefers built-in applets to external programs when running commands. This preference can be overridden by setting the environment variable BB_OVERRIDE_APPLETS to a space-separated list of applet names. Thus, to use an external make in preference to the built-in applet set BB_OVERRIDE_APPLETS="make".
• It's possible to obtain pseudo-random numbers using if=/dev/urandom as the input file to dd. The same emulation of /dev/urandom is used internally by the shred utility and to support https in wget. Serious users of random numbers may, of course, wish to make alternative arrangements.