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Comment by opan | Hacker News Reader

IIRC this was made to solve a licensing issue with busybox (toybox being more permissive) and be included with Android. As a fan of copyleft, initially the idea annoyed me, but I eventually came to the conclusion that if it was the only way to include better tools in a particular OS out of the box, it was probably fine.

I recall busybox being often used for gpl enforcement, so I wonder now how widespread toybox is by various companies hoping to avoid that. Do modern Smart TVs and such use it?

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The license page and linked blog posts mentions this: https://landley.net/toybox/license.html

I like the 0BSD license (see my https://xn--gba.st), AWS also uses the semantically equivalent MIT-0 license for code samples, etc.

I believe most smart TVs use Android as the base, so I would think yes.

I think Samsung still use Tizen (still Linux, seems to use Toybox) and LG uses WebOS (Linux again, not sure if it uses Toybox).

Just looked through my TV, webOS uses Busybox.

please teach me how to do this, I have a webos lg tv which is literally not being used because my father used to watch youtube but then youtube almost stopped working on it and there are no more updates and I tried to root it but i couldn't and I just want to use it instead of it being a junk.

Any guide on helping me prevent some e-waste at my home. I would prefer to have complete linux access of my lgtv and use something like tiny core linux on my webos tv or something, is something like this possible or?

Try https://cani.rootmy.tv/

Normally how you realize your TV runs busybox is by looking at the last parts of the manual, not by just casually sshing into it and running busybox --version.

It is however a lot easier to SSH into it.

root@lgwebostv:~# busybox

BusyBox v1.29.2 (2024-06-12 00:33:13 UTC) multi-call binary.

Use it with a setup box?

my parents bought the "smart" tv a decade ago to switch away from setup box

It was kinda expensive at the time, its wild of sorts how cheap of sorts TV's have become right now but still we bought it and its just e-waste right now.

I am thinking of setting up a raspberry pi but I am more interested in learning the inner details or how to do things preferably without raspberry pi as well

It's not e-waste. Your ignorance for the easy solution makes it e-waste. There is nothing to learn from bad embedded systems.

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