A two-minute tour
Every window and panel in MSL, in the order you'll meet them.
On this page 4 sections
MSL has one main window, a file browser, and a few smaller windows. Here's all of it, left to right.
The main window#
A sidebar-and-detail window, like Mail or Notes.
- The sidebar lists your instances — each is one Linux machine with its own name. A coloured badge shows the distro; a small dot shows whether it's running. At the top, a pill like
1/4shows how many are running out of the most MSL will run at once. At the bottom: New Instance, and a strip of the people who built MSL. - The header across the top of the right-hand side shows the selected instance's name, distro and state, with Terminal and Start (or Suspend/Resume, or Install if its distro isn't downloaded).
- Five tabs sit under the header. More on each below.
More detail: The main window.
The five tabs#
| Tab | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Applications | The Linux GUI apps inside the instance, with their real icons. Open them, add them to your Applications folder, pin them to the Dock. |
| Terminal | A full terminal with a real Linux shell in it. |
| Overview | The instance's settings: SSH, CPUs and memory, disk size, the shared home folder. |
| Tools | The background service, generated apps, snapshots, maintenance and repair, and suspend/hibernate/shut down/remove. |
| Sandbox | Switches that cut the instance off from the network, your files, graphics or input — plus the Traffic Monitor. |
The other windows#
- MSL Files (⌥⌘F) — a Finder work-alike that shows your Mac and your running Linux instances side by side, so you can drag files across. See MSL Files.
- Traffic Monitor — a live log of what MSL and an instance are saying to each other. Opened from the Sandbox tab. See Traffic Monitor.
- About MSL — what MSL is, its licences, the people who built it, and some stories. It's in the MSL menu.
- MSL Help — this. It's in the Help menu.
Things that happen on their own#
- MSL's background service,
mslhd, starts when you log in. It's what actually runs every instance, and it keeps running when the MSL window is closed — Linux apps you've added to your Dock work without MSL open. - When you close the last terminal session on an instance, MSL suspends it a few seconds later so it stops using your processor. Opening a shell or an app wakes it again. See Idle instances.
- When your Mac sleeps, shuts down or logs out, MSL freezes every running instance first so nothing is mid-write. See Sleep, shutdown and battery.