Is it possible to gain root and/or install BusyBox on the Android Emulator?

Question

It'd be nice to have the "Swiss Army knife" of BusyBox on my emulator. It would also be nice to have full root access. Does anyone have any experience doing this? I'm not familiar with qemu; is this even possible?

Update: The emulator has root by default (accessed via the adb shell command). Does anyone know where I can easily obtain a pre-built busybox binary?

Answer 1

The emulator is not set to secure mode, so it's adb shell should be a root shell.

There are several android builds of busybox, for example cyanogen alternative versions of Android use it to augment toolbox (which is Android's own limited re-implementation of the same concept under a non-gpl license). You should be able to get it from the cyanogen repositories and build it from source, or it's possible that just extracting the binaries from a same-android-version cyanogen update.zip would work (it may be in a compressed file system inside the update though)

There were also some writeups from pioneers who discovered the accidental root shell on the original G1 release and installed quite a bit of debian arm.