Words you'll see · MSL Wiki

A handful of words come up everywhere in MSL. Here they are in the order they start to matter. The glossary has the full A–Z.

Instance#

One Linux machine, with a name you chose — work, scratch, gimp-box. Each instance has its own settings, its own saved state, its own apps list and its own sandbox switches. You can have as many as you like.

Distro#

Short for distribution — the flavour of Linux: Alpine, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, Rocky and more. Every instance is one distro, chosen when you create it. See Choosing a distro.

Image#

A distro's disk: one big file on your Mac that holds the whole Linux filesystem. You download it once per distro.

Guest and host#

The guest is Linux, inside the virtual machine. The host is your Mac. "Guest-side" means something happens inside Linux; "host-side" means your Mac does it from outside, where Linux can't interfere.

Running, suspended, hibernated, stopped#

State	Dot	What it means
Running	green	Linux is up.
Starting…	yellow	On its way up or down.
Suspended	orange	Frozen in memory. Resumes almost instantly, but still holds its memory on your Mac.
Stopped	grey	Not running. It may have a hibernated session saved to disk — then starting it picks up exactly where it left off.

The difference between suspend, hibernate and shut down is covered properly in Suspend, hibernate or shut down?.

mslhd#

MSL's background service. It hosts every instance, starts at login, and keeps running when the MSL window is closed. If it isn't running, nothing can start. See The background service.

mslgd#

MSL's own X11 display server — the part that turns a Linux app's drawing into a real Mac window. It was written from scratch for MSL. See Under the hood.

Snapshot#

A saved copy of a whole running machine — memory and disk — that you can go back to. See Snapshots.

Gate#

One of the four Sandbox switches: network, Mac home share, graphics, keyboard & mouse. A gate is either open or cut.