First, congratulations on joining our revolution! In this short tutorial we'll introduce you to the key components of your new Zonbu device and see how to set up several applications to fit your personal style.

The Zonbu desktop is designed to be similar to standard computer desktops:

• The Start Menu provides access to all your applications, the Quick Launch menu offers one-click access to the most important applications, and each active application gets a spot on the Taskbar. The System Tray on the bottom right shows the current time and date. You can switch to a different active application by clicking its icon in the Taskbar or by holding down the ALT key and pressing the TAB key until the icon for the desired application is highlighted and then releasing both keys.
• Applications have menus at the top of their windows, which you can open by clicking with your mouse. You can move the window around on the screen by clicking on the title bar, holding the mouse button down and dragging the mouse until the window is where you want it.
• Windows can be resized manually by moving the cursor to a corner or an edge — you'll know you're at the right place when the cursor changes from it's normal arrow shape to an arrow with a line across its point — holding down the mouse button and dragging in the desired direction. You can hide, maximize or close the window by clicking one of the three icons in the top right corner of the window.
• Any image can be selected as the wallpaper on your desktop.
• Most applications have toolbars for one click access to their most common functions, like bold and underline in the word processor or back and forward in Firefox.
• Most applications have a Preferences or Options menu for you to configure them to best suit your needs. Firefox, for instance, allows you to set one or several web pages (via tabbed browsing) to open when it starts, and to turn on the popup blocker to stop web sites from opening additional windows without your permission. Email and Calendar has preferences to configure your email accounts and whether messages sent to you as HTML should be shown as HTML or plain text.
  
  
  

Application Highlights

Email and Calendar is a powerful personal information manager. The first time you run it, it asks you to set up at least one email account. You can open the Preferences window later to add more accounts. Email and Calendar can be a client to the Microsoft Exchange servers used by many corporations or can be used to download your web mails such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail or others.

Firefox is the standards-compliant, state-of-the-art and increasingly popular web browser from the Mozilla Foundation. The homepage defaults to Zonbu.com but you may change this by opening a page, opening the Preferences window's General tab and click Use Current Pages. Firefox can be extended using many add-ons contributed by its very active developer community, which you can install by choosing Extensions from the Tools menu and then clicking Get More Extensions at the bottom of the Extensions window.

Office, based on the award-winning OpenOffice.org, includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, database, drawing and math applications which can read and write files produced by the Microsoft Office programs. Also available from this Start menu are Personal Finance Manager, and Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Music Library and Media Player give your Zonbu the capabilities of a home entertainment center. The first time you run Music Library (Banshee) you're asked to select a directory location from which it can import songs. You can import more songs later by choosing Import from the Music menu.  Music Library can also manage podcast subscriptions and be your Internet Radio client; 32 stations are included in the default setup and more can be added by right clicking on Radio on the left side list and selecting Add Station. The application also can manage your music on iPods and other portable music players, supports burning CDs and includes the popular Audioscrobbler service from Last.fm — share your music taste with friends, show you what they're listening to and publish charts on your MySpace, blog or website.

Media Player is a simpler tool but supports playback of fullscreen video, including commercial DVDs. Please note that to play DVDs or CDs or to burn CDs you must connect an external USB drive to your Zonbu device.

Photo Organizer is a capable tool which has basic photo editing features (crop, sharpen, rotate, remove red eye) as well as powerful organizing abilities including tag-based smart folders and export to Flickr (Yahoo!), Picasa (Google), web galleries and CDs. The application runs an importer the first time you use it and can grab photos from your digital camera when connected to a Zonbu device through a USB port. You can also use Photo Organizer as your screensaver, displaying selected photos.

Skype and Instant Messenger give you the means to connect with your family, friends and colleagues all over the world at little or no cost. You may connect any USB phone or headset (not supplied by Zonbu) to make voice calls with Skype while the Pidgin Instant Messenger gives you one place for chatting on IRC, AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo! networks. Both apps run wizards to set up new or existing accounts the first time it is run.

30 games are installed on your Zonbu including classics like Chess, Breakout, Tetris, Civilization, Billiard, shooters Blobwars, Chromium and popular hits such as Soduku and Mahjongg.

Control Panel and System Utilities
These two Start Menu choices give you access to system-level configuration and diagnostic/repair tools. When your system is working properly, you'll generally only need four of the tools, all on the Control Panel: Printers, Desktop, Screensaver and Zonbu Account. As expected, Printers is where you add and remove the printers your Zonbu can access, Desktop and Screensaver are where the respective graphics are changed and the last is for updating the information associated with your service account like address and type of Zonbu device you have.

The remaining selections on the Control Panel and all those on the System menu will rarely be used by you, either to handle hardware or connectivity the operating system cannot manage automatically or when there's a problem with your computer or service. One example would be when you are connecting to the Internet through a protected network (for instance on a corporate or university network) and you have to configure the proxy settings, which is done on the Storage applet on Control Panel.

Complete list of Control Panel applets and System utilities

Menu	Tool	Sets/Controls
Control Panel	Desktop	Wallpaper, background color, window transparency, icon, taskbar and default font size
	Display	Display resolution, generally 1280x1024
	Keyboard	Typing and cursor speed, shortcuts and accessibility
	Mouse	Button assignment, click speed, cursor images and accessibility
	Networking	DHCP or Manual IP address
	Printers	Add/delete printers, printer-specific properties
	ScreenSaver	Select screensaver, screensaver-specific properties, lock on inactivity
	Sound	Speaker volume, microphone capture
	Storage	Explained in depth under the Files and Storage tab
	Time and Date	Timezone, current date and time, Internet Time Server
	Zonbu Account	Change details of your account including email and postal addresses
Control Panel Advanced Settings	Keyboard Selector	Keyboard layout: defaults to U.S. English
	Remote Desktop	Enables you to permit (people at) other computers to view and/or control your Zonbu.
	Restart Firefox	For performance reasons, Firefox is automatically started when your computer starts up; use this tool to force a complete shutdown of the application when needed, such as after installing an extension.
	Restart Neighborhood	Zonbu periodically rescans your network to detect new network-sharing devices. This tool forces a rescan. Use it if you turn on a new network-sharing device but it does not appear in your Zonbu's Neighborhood list.
	Startup	Lists applications to be started when your computer starts up (Firefox is not on this list because it must be started with the OS).
System	About Zonbu	Displays the version of the Zonbu OS on your computer
	Remote Repair	Enables Zonbu Support to correct certain infrequently encountered problems
	Reset to Defaults	Resets all preferences to factory settings
	Run Program	Provides a command line to launch infrequently used applications and utilities
	Task Manager	Lists all running applications, including memory and CPU used by each
	Terminal	Enables you to run Unix commands on the system. This is recommended for advanced users only.

• Managing and Finding Files
• Using the Zonbu File Browser
• Understanding Zonbu Storage
• Managing Storage Settings

Managing and Finding Files

The very first choice on the Start Menu is Documents. Clicking it opens File Manager, which you can use like Windows Explorer or Mac OS X's Finder to create, copy, delete and move files and directories. File Manager is a little different than Windows Explorer in that it is set up for your convenience to work mainly with the files that you create rather than all files and directories. You can, of course, move to other parts of your storage when necessary by selecting Show Hidden Files from the View Menu (shortcut key: CTRL+H). If there is a directory you use frequently that isn't at the top level under Documents, you can add it to the Shortcuts list in the Side Pane by simply dragging it over from from the main window.

The fourth choice on the Start Menu, Desktop Search, gives you the ability to find any file or directory based on all or part of its name, its type or extension, size, date created or changed and so on. You can also launch Desktop Search by clicking the binocular icon on the Quick Launch panel.

 

Using the Zonbu File Browser
This handy utility runs on Windows and allows you anytime, anywhere secure access to your online storage using the same strong encryption as your Zonbu. You can copy to or from your storage by dragging files or directories onto or out of the window, delete files or directories and work with files using Windows applications without having to carry your computer with you.

Download Zonbu File Browser

Zonbu File Browser is simple to use. Directories are shown in a tree view on the left and files from the active selected directory are shown on the right and can be listed in the standard four view modes (large icons, small icons, list and details). Clicking on a column title (Name, Compressed Size, Date) in the file window will sort the files according to that column; clicking the same title a second time toggles between ascending and descending order.

Note: After making any changes through this utility, you'll need to refresh your Zonbu's local cache. Do this by opening the Storage applet on the Control Panel, selecting the Refresh tab and clicking the Refresh button. Depending on how many files have been added, changed or deleted and whether they're all in one directory or several, choose either the Refresh All Folders or Refresh a Folder and its Sub-Folders option.

Toolbar and Other Menu Functions

• Connect: Puts the file browser in online mode, reestablishing the connection to your online storage.
• Disconnect: Puts the file browser in offline mode but does not close the application.
• Copy: Copies the selected files or directories to your Windows PC from your online storage.
• Paste: Copies the file in the Windows clipboard to your online storage.
• Delete: Removes the selected files or directories from your online storage.
• Refresh: Synchronizes the file browser view with your online storage.
• View Mode: Switches the file window among icon, list and detail views.
• Change Password: Be careful! This changes the password for your Zonbu account across all systems.
• Properties: Opens a detailed property window for the currently selected file or directory.
• Show Hidden Files: These are system and application files which you should ordinarily have no need to touch, so they are not visible by default.

 

Understanding Zonbu Storage
With Zonbu, your data — whether it's a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, a music file or email — is primarily stored on our servers out on the Internet. For privacy and security, your data is always protected using a very strong, 128-bit encryption mechanism between your Zonbu device and our servers. For reliability and performance, we use Amazon's robust and innovative S3 service to power this Online Storage.

The Zonbu device does not have a hard disk. Instead, a 4GB compact flash (similar to what digital cameras and MP3 players use) stores the operating system and the application which have been installed. The remaining space of the compact flash is used as a cache to store local copies of files you've recently used; special software keeps these copies synchronized with the online storage servers. In other words, when you need to work on a file, the file is:

1. transparently downloaded to the compact flash cache,
2. modified locally using the appropriate application such as OpenOffice.org, Image Workshop or Web Page Editor and,
3. promptly uploaded to the server every time you save the file.

Since all your data is stored on the Zonbu servers:

• You can access the files from any Internet-connected device using the file browser — which initially works only on Windows 98, 2000, XP and Vista.
• When you use a new, more powerful Zonbu device in the future, you simply log in to the new computer with your existing account name and password — there is no need to migrate or transfer your data.
• If your storage needs outgrow your current Zonbu service plan, simply fill out the upgrade form to get additional space.
• Files are backed up by us and will not be lost due to hard disk or computer failure, corruption by other applications, or theft of your machine.

Zonbu comes in three service plans, each with a different amount of online storage: 25, 50 and 100GB.

 

Managing Storage Settings
To change the storage configuration on your Zonbu, open the Storage applet on the Start Menu Control Panel. The applet has three tabs, Status, Connect and Refresh.

Status
This panel exposes a great deal of information about the state of your storage. From top to bottom:

Online	Is your PC connected to the Zonbu servers?
Used space	How much of your allotment of online storage is taken up by your files
Local cache	How much of your cache space is used
Download	Set minimum size of a file to cause the progress indicator to be shown; default is 1MB since anything smaller will finish before the indicator would display anything.
Show Activity	Opens the progress indicator dialog whether or not any downloads are happening, and remains open until you close it.
Upload	If some files have been worked on but not yet uploaded to the online storage, the number and total size is listed; clicking the Show Files button opens a list of these files.

Connect
The Connect tab controls proxy settings, manually connecting or disconnecting your Zonbu device from the Internet and changing your master account password.

 

• Proxy settings are only used if your Zonbu is inside a controlled network like a corporate office or school campus which have special software to manage internet access. If you need to set this up your network administrator or provider will have given you the information required. Note that any proxy settings you configure on this screen are only used for connecting to the online storage and are not passed through to other web applications such as Firefox, Skype or GAIM instant messaging.
• Disconnecting from and reconnecting to the network will generally only be necessary when a problem occurs with your connection or your computer.
• Be careful about changing your password — this is the one you use when signing on to the computer and accessing your files over the Internet.

Refresh
When you use the File Browser to connect to your online storage from another PC and make changes to any of your files (or add or delete files), use the Refresh button on this tab to synchronize your Zonbu's list of files with the changes. You can select which of the two levels of sync is needed

.

• Refresh All Folders: Use this when there are many new files to synchronize, such as when you used the Import Tool or file browser.
• Refresh a folder and its sub-folders (advanced): Use this when you know there is only one folder or folder and its subdirectories to synchronize.

Zonbu's Safety Advantage
Let's take a look at one of the big differences between the Zonbu OS and other standard OS. For several reasons, such as the way Company has designed their products and the very large number of computers that run it, some OS are vulnerable to the target of many malicious people. Any computer running that standard operating system must run anti-virus and other protective applications. New vulnerabilities are discovered every day. Research done in late 2006 found that an unprotected PC connected to the Internet became infected in under 10 minutes!

Zonbu, however, is not vulnerable to these troubling invaders since it uses a very different design; viruses programmed to attack vulnerabilities in standard OS cannot hurt Zonbu. If for any reason something wrong happens on the system, Zonbu has a self-healing architecture where it can reset and repair itself. The core of the Zonbu operating system is in read only mode and by default, the system restricts the privileges you have to run an application. Last, Zonbu runs a firewall program which is turned on by default to keep your computer beyond the reach of other people. All of this makes your computer far less vulnerable and much more secure.

Because your files ought to be safeguarded, the operating system requires you to log in each time you restart the computer. If the screensaver has been running long enough the computer will enter lockdown mode and will ask for your user name and password when you dismiss the screensaver.

Importing Files and Emails from your Previous Computer
There are four methods by which you can transfer documents and email archives to your Zonbu. The best choice depends on your situation and we hope to give you enough information here to choose. However, if you still have questions, please visit the Help Desk.

• Importer: This is a utility we provide which runs on your previous PC (if your PC runs Microsoft Windows®). There are two steps in using it. First, you get a panel that has your previous PC's files on the left and your Zonbu online storage on the right. You drag directories and folders to be transferred from the old side to the new. Second, select your email software from the list of Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Composer 4.0 and Eudora (we plan to add additional choices soon). Import Tool sends your choices directly to your online storage and everything is synchronized when you go back to your Zonbu and run the Refresh utility from the Storage control panel applet's Refresh tab. This is the best choice when you want to transfer from one of the supported email applications to Zonbu Email and Calendar.
• File Browser: As mentioned previously, you can access your online storage from other computers using this utility. Not only can you copy files and directories from the online storage you can also send files and directories to it. Then, you must run the Refresh utility, which can be found under Start > Control Panel > Storage > Refresh. This is faster than either of the following two choices and the best option when not migrating email archives.
• USB drive/Compact Disc: If your previous computer can't run File Browser or the Importer, you can copy the files to a USB drive or a compact disc (if you've connected a CD or DVD drive to your Zonbu), plug the USB drive/load the CD into your Zonbu and use File Manager to copy everything to your Zonbu.
• Neighborhood Copy: Zonbu can connect to other PCs on your network and access their hard drives, and you can use File Manager to copy files from your previous PC by putting both computers on your network.

Note: The last two options are a bit less efficient than the first two options because the files must be copied into your local cache and then uploaded to the online storage.

Download Zonbu Importer

This Windows-based tool gives you a simple way to import documents from other PCs and your existing email (account information and messages) to your Zonbu. Please note that email import capability is currently limited to Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, Eudora or Netscape Communicator 4.x, although many other email clients can export to one of these formats, either directly or through a utility,

1. After launching the importer you are prompted to login. If you've used it before or used the Zonbu File Browser, your email address will already be filled in but you will always need to supply the password. Once your information is authenticated the tool is connected to our Zonbu Online storage. Click the Next button to continue.
2. The second screen is where you choose which, if any, files should be sent to your Zonbu. Select Do Nothing for none, Import My Documents to send all files in your My Documents folder (and all sub-folders within it) or Select manually the files to be imported to pick specific files.
3. Choosing the last option uncovers two lists on the bottom half of this panel: Local Folders and Zonbu Online folder. For each local folder you want sent, select it and drag it to the folder in the Zonbu Online list where you would like it to end up. Repeat this drag and drop for each folder to transfer but keep in mind that sub-folders within a selected folder will be automatically included in the transfer and need not be selected individually. Only folders and not individual files can be selected in this version of the program.
4. Click Next after making your selection.
5. The third screen is where you choose which email application, if any, to import to your Zonbu Email and Calendar program. Your options are Do Nothing, Communicator 4.x, Eudora, Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Outlook Express. Click Next after making your selection.
6. On the fourth screen you launch the transfer. If you're not completely sure you made the right choices use the Back button to return to the previous screens and double check. Files are generally not an issue but the wrong email selection might cause problems of the annoying variety. Click Start when ready.
7. The fifth screen shows the upload progress. How long this takes depends on the total size of files and email involved as well as the speed of your Internet connection. If you're sending many music files, a big email archive or both, expect it to keep going for quite some time and simply let it run to completion. The Importer will not time out on its own.
8. When the transfer finishes you will see either a simple success message or an error message on the final screen. If you do get an error message and the reason shown isn't clear, please contact support through the Help Desk so we can work out the problem with you. Click Exit and you're done — Almost!
9. Because you sent files directly to the online storage, your Zonbu does not know about them. Restoring the synchronized state is simple. On your Zonbu, select Start > Control Panel > Storage > Refresh and click the "Refresh" button. No files actually get moved during the refresh, just operating system references to them, it just takes a moment. Now you are done importing files and emails!