Switch from busybox defconfig to baseconfig-busybox selecting just what we need, with a config variable to use defconfig instead if you really want that. Busybox defconfig doesn't build on Ubuntu 11.10 because of an app that didn't exist until recently breaking. Busybox keeps ininitely adding more and more stuff (with the Katamari Damacy theme playing), and it becomes more of a portability issue keeping it all working. Plus, most if it should not be in busybox anyway. I've revived my toybox project, and would eventually like to be able to use that here anyway, and a specific set of functionality is easier to replace than a moving target. This is an experimentally determined defconfig good enough to build aboriginal and linux from scratch, plus things like vi and shell history that I obviously missed. I'll probably add more stuff later. If I still want to do static defconfig busybox binaries for each target, I can do them as native builds via hdc.

--- a/config	Thu Dec 22 16:49:03 2011 -0600
+++ b/config	Tue Dec 27 08:58:16 2011 -0600
@@ -130,6 +130,16 @@
 
 # export HOST_EXTRA="lex yacc"
 
+# Get your commands, for both host-tools and simple-root-filesystem, from:
+#
+#   busybox - busybox configured with with sources/baseconfig-busybox
+#   busybox_defconfig - busybox configured with defconfig
+#   toybox - toybox defconfig (plus busybox with baseconfig-toybox-todo)
+#
+# Default is "busybox".
+
+# export TOYBOX=busybox
+
 # Set this to continue despite failed patches.
 
 # export ALLOW_PATCH_FAILURE=1