I try to make the GUI as simple as possible. This is to make it easy for someone to transition from their old OS? to the new one. With the OS being a graphical OS, there will be icons that would appear. With that said, I will start from the top left, and work down to the bottom right. By doing this, you would have all of the features in mind. The OS is designed to be a minimal looking OS. Having icons all over the screen just makes a mess of things.
At the very top corner of the screen running from left to right will be a menu bar. Even with multi-tasking, there is only one app in front at the same time. Even if you had 2 apps side by side, you can only interact with one app at a time. This menu bar will show the file menu for the active app. In the very top left corner will be a white S icon. Selecting that icon will bring up computer wide settings. You would learn about your computer, System Settings, access to App Store, Force Quit your app (when available), Sleep, Shut Down, Restart. You would also be able to switch profiles, or lock screen. Any app in focus, the name of the app will show next to the S. Selecting this name will bring up app settings, including About, Hide, or close. From there, you would have your expected menu. On the right hand side, you would see any a circle with an i. This is for internet storage drives such as Dropbox. This will allow you to select the i, and have access without it flooding the menu bar. Next to the i, you will find an icon to back up your files, and other important information. For this to work, you need an external drive, or a NAS?. If there are no conditions, you would not be able to have this icon show up. Next to that icon is your network settings. Red is no network connection. Yellow is LAN? only, and green is Internet connected. Next to the connection status, you will have a search icon which will allow you to search system wide, and then internet wide. Next to the search is your widgets icon. Selecting that will bring up a panel with all of your widget. Next to the Widgets icon, you would have the Control Center. This will do things such as show your network statuses, and any features that you can turn off or on (such as volume, Bluetooth, Cellular). Next to the Control Center is your date (minus year) and time. Selecting your date and time will bring down a panel showing a calendar for this month. When a date is in a green circle, that is an appointment. Selecting the time, you would have alarms, world clocks, timers, and stopwatch.
In the top left below the menu bar, you would have icons that will go from up to down. Your first icon is always your device. Selecting the icon will highlight it. double clicking will open the icon up to show you the root of the computer including the mounted drives. Any drive formatted for Linux is automatically formatted for Senitrus to read, and write, and will have a green dot in the lower right hand corner of the icon. Windows formatted drives can be read, but not write. These drives will show with a yellow colored dot. Red dot drives will mean you can’t read or write to them. You would have to format and lose all data on it. If a drive has a lock icon the bottom left of the drive icon, this is an encrypted drive. You can double click a drive to open it, and look inside assuming you have credentials. For example, double clicking D:/ will show the folders of Documents, Downloads, Music, Photos, and Videos since this is your personal files drive. Right clicking on the drive will allow you to Copy To, Duplicate To, Move To, or unmount. Hovering your pointer over the drive will show your space statistics such as storage in full, and storage remaining in Gigabytes. C:/ – E:/ can’t unmount since they are built into the computer’s motherboard. E:/ will unmount automatically if not connected to the internet. The same with all other internet drives that are compatible to Senitrus Systems. Duplicate will make an image of that drive, and pasting to another drive will copy bit for bit (including hidden files) to the destination drive. This is good if you are going to upgrade your B:/ drive to a larger microSD card. If you should have any servers or NAS drives, you would need to authenticate with them. Senitrus will look for servers using Server OS. All servers, NAS? and other resources will be in the Network icon. You would see everything that is under your control. In example, if you are a room mate to the network owner, you might see a small NAS drive made available to you, but you will not be able to access anything else that is not shared to you. Therefore, double clicking the router icon you would be informed that you are denied access. You would see your computer with a green line to the router. Above the green line will be your LAN IP address. The green line from the router to the globe will have your current WAN? IP Address.
Below your computer, you will find your handhelds. Double clicking on the device will bring up your file manager to show your drives. For handhelds, this is likely B:/, C:/ and E:/. However, you should not enter C:/ unless you know what you are doing. B:/ will have your personal files in it, and E:/ is your Senitrus Drive. More information on that below. As with all other drives, you can copy, duplicate, and unmount (except C:/, and E:/). This is good if you are changing your microSD card. Below your handhelds is your printers.
Below your devices, you would find your shared resources. For example, if you have a room mate that has a Senitrus printer, and they allow you to have access to that printer. You can double click the printer, and see B:/ unless the owner forbids it. You can drag a file to the printer icon to automatically print without having to open the application – therefore conserving resources. If you use a particular network drive often, you can map it, and it will show on your left side of the screen. Mapped drives will start at Z:/ and work its way down.
Down in the bottom left of the corner is an S icon. Selecting this icon will bring up a listing of all of your program folders (Communications, Entertainment, Internet and so on). You would also see a folder called Open. Hovering over the appropriate folder will bring a sub menu of the applications in that folder. Hovering over the Open folder will show all of your open applications. You can select the app you wish to open. If you have a printable file open, you can press CTRL+P to print on your default printer. To Select a different printer, you select Shift+CTRL+P to bring up an options box where you would select the appropriate printer. If the printer does not support your document page size, you would get a warning of such. This will only work with Senitrus Printers. In the bottom of the screen is all of your open applications. Hovering over the app in the menu bar will show the files open. In the bottom right corner of the screen will be a lock icon. Selecting. that lock will lock the system, and require authentication to get back in. To the left of the lock will be all of your workspace panels. Next to the lock is an icon with 4 squares. This is your workspaces icon. Selecting this icon will show all of the available workspaces, and what’s inside on the spaces.
You would have noticed that I made reference to drives with letters. This is because while being a Linux OS, the drive letters will be aliases to the directory of the Linux system for identification. All Senitrus devices will have the same lettering for the drive. This is to keep things simple, especially with multiple devices. The drives are as follows:
- A:/ SD Card reader
- B:/ microSD card slot
- C:/ OS and Applications
- D:/ Personal Files on computer
- E:/ Senitrus Drive
A:/ is available on all computers, printers, and servers. Being an SD Card reader, you can insert the card, and interact with it to the limits of the device the card is plugged into. When there is no SD card in the device, then the A:/ will be greyed out. Also, the A series can only support up to 2TB cards. You can’t interact with a card that is not in the reader. B:/ is your microSD card slot. This is designed in a way where it is inconvenient to remove. This card is intended to stay within the system, and the card could be important for your needs if the need should arise. All devices comes with a 64GB? card with purchase, or you choose to upgrade the microSD card at order. You can add the card to the system before booting, and you would just have to format the card. You can do so by right clicking B:/ in the device icon and select format. If you should add an external drive, to the computer’s USB-C port, the drive will show up starting with F:/ and going up from there. Networked attached drives will show as Z:/ and work its way down. And while not common, you can have partitions within drives. If you were to install Windows alongside with your Senitrus OS, then you would have a C.1:/ Partition for your Senitrus OS drive, and a C.2:/ Partition for your Windows install. You can also make partitions in the drive manager by right clicking, and select Manage. This will allow you to split the drive into partitions. In case you have any ideas, Windows does not play nice with another OS. This has led to Windows changing your boot loader, and forgetting you have a separate OS. If you wish to use Windows, you should install it on a virtual machine, or another computer.
The system is designed to keep things things simple. For those that will find the keyboard shortcuts will work faster, there will be many shortcuts that might seem familiar to someone coming from another OS. A list of shortcuts are as follows:
- CTRL+A: Select All
- CTRL+C: Copy
- CTRL+P: Print
- CTRL+Q: Quit
- CTRL+V: Paste
- CTRL+X: Cut
- CTRL+Z: Undo
- Delete (selected Icon): Move icon to trash
- CTRL+Delete (selected Icon): Move icon to Shredder