Shani Cassini (System Manager)
Shani Cassini is the Shanios system manager — named after the spacecraft that orbited and watched over Saturn. It is part of the GNOME, KDE Plasma and COSMIC editions from the images built after 25 September 2026; open it from the app grid (Shani Cassini) or run shani-cassini. It shows what the system tools report and nothing else: every page is backed by shani-deploy, shani-health, gen-efi or systemd itself, so what you see is what the command line would tell you.
Open a page directly with shani-cassini --section=<name> (for example --section=updates), where the name is one of the 42 page ids in notebook.py's SECTIONS:
| Group | Page ids |
|---|---|
| System | overview, health, storage, smart, system, drivers, btrfs, persistence, timers, cron |
| Security | secureboot, encryption, lsm, audit, firewall, biometrics, smartcard, securitykeys, sshkeys, kerberos, directory, access, remoteaccess, apparmor |
| Updates | boot, updates |
| Manage | services, containers, virtualization, sharing, backup, maintenance, modules, firmware, graphics, audio, journal |
| Apps | chronoa, fleet |
The same is available over D-Bus as gapplication action dev.shani.cassini show-section "'btrfs'".
Pages
| Page | What it does | Under the hood |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | Version, edition, slot, whether an update is waiting | shani-deploy --status --check --json |
| Health | Runs the integrity check and the security audit on request; lists this boot's error messages and recent crashes | shani-health --verify --json, --security --json, journalctl -b -p err, coredumpctl |
| System Info | Model, firmware, OS, clock sync, boot time, hardware, kernel | hostnamectl, timedatectl, systemd-analyze |
| Drivers | PCI devices and their kernel drivers | lspci, loaded modules |
| Secure Boot | Secure Boot state and MOK keys | mokutil, gen-efi enroll-mok |
| Encryption | Whether the disk is encrypted; set up or turn off TPM2 automatic unlock (optionally with a PIN) | gen-efi tpm2-status, enroll-tpm2, remove-tpm2 |
| Updates & Rollback | Update channel (Stable/Latest), install an update, go back to the previous system | shani-deploy, --set-channel, --rollback |
| Services | Switch system services on or off, start/stop/restart, read a service's log | systemctl, journalctl -u |
| Backup | Backup location and tools; opens Shani Backup | org.shani.backup settings |
| Maintenance | Disk space, clean up old downloads, deduplicate, create a diagnostic report, reset the computer | shani-deploy --cleanup/--optimize, shani-health --export-logs, shani-reset |
| Chronoa | The assistant's engines and main switches; opens Chronoa | org.shani.chronoa settings |
| Fleet | Enrollment status, and enrolling or removing this device (only when the fleet agent is installed) | shani-fleet-agent status, enroll, uninstall --yes |
That table is a summary. Cassini has 57 pages; these are the ones that do something you would go looking for. The rest are grouped here because they report rather than act.
Pages that report a subsystem nothing else has a panel for
Neither GNOME Control Center nor KDE System Settings has one of these. All are read-only: they show what the tool says and change nothing.
| Page | What it reports | Under the hood |
|---|---|---|
| Cron | The machine's own scheduled jobs — crontab -l shows only your own | reads /etc/crontab, /etc/cron.d and /etc/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly} |
| AppArmor (now a group on LSM) | The confinement profiles loaded, and which are enforcing rather than complaining. AppArmor is one of the LSMs the kernel reports, and the LSM page already showed aa-status's counts, so the profile list moved in beside them. Both come out of one pkexec aa-status, not two | aa-status (needs your password, so it runs when you press the button) |
| Kernel Modules | Every loaded module, its dependencies, and each parameter's current value | /proc/modules, /sys/module |
| Firmware | The hardware firmware installed, and what LVFS is offering | fwupdmgr get-devices --json, get-updates --json |
| Graphics | Graphics hardware, the driver bound to each, whether each card is powered, the render nodes, and hybrid-graphics state | lspci -k, /sys/bus/pci/devices//power/runtime_status, /dev/dri/render, switcheroo-control |
| Audio | The PipeWire graph: devices, outputs, inputs, which is default, which programs are connected | wpctl status |
| Journal | Every boot still on disk, a search across their entries, whether logs survive a reboot, and the cap actually in force | journalctl, /var/log/journal, /usr/lib/systemd/journald.conf.d/ |
| DNS | Which of the four installed resolvers actually answers, whether resolv.conf is a stub symlink or a plain file, and whether the global DNS= is set | /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/systemd/resolved.conf and its drop-ins, systemctl is-active |
| UPS | Whether a UPS is configured, whether the daemon is running, and what apcupsd itself reports | /etc/apcupsd/apcupsd.conf, systemctl is-active apcupsd, apcaccess status |
| Outbound Mail | Whether mail this machine sends will leave it: the relay setup, and anything stuck in the queue | exim -bP transports, exim -bp |
| Inbound Access | Which sharing services are installed, which are enabled, and what they are bound to — and the rule that nothing here may change your network | ss -tulpn, systemctl is-enabled |
| Disk Health | Whether smartd is scheduled and what its scan settings are, plus the overall health of each disk | smartd.conf, smartctl -H |
| Btrfs | Scrub and balance timers, and the result of the last run of each | btrfs scrub status, btrfs balance status, systemctl timers |
| Software RAID | Arrays and their members, their state and sync progress. Note the Personalities : line lists kernel drivers, not arrays — it is not a count | /proc/mdstat |
| TOTP Tokens | Whether oathtool is installed, whether a PAM stack actually uses it, and the stored accounts. Unlocking is pam_oath; Shanios has none of it installed | /var/lib/oath/users.oath, /etc/pam.d |
| Boot Entries | What the firmware will boot, and which slot is really in charge — EFI order is decided at install time and is not rewritten per slot | efibootmgr -v |
| Acceleration | Whether KVM is usable: CPU virtualisation flags, the kvm module, and IOMMU groups. Refuses any firmware change it cannot verify — on this machine all 154 EFI variables are protected and the CPU exposes no vmx, so enabling KVM through NVRAM is not offered | /proc/cpuinfo, /sys/kernel/iommu_groups, efivarfs |
| Password Policy | What pam_pwquality is set to. Shanios installs it but does not wire it into any PAM stack, so this shows the configuration, not live enforcement | /etc/security/pwquality.conf |
| Userspace Encryption | fscrypt, gocryptfs and ecryptfs, per file and per mountpoint. fscrypt cannot work on Shanios: the kernel requires it on a filesystem with encryption support, and btrfs does not provide it | /etc/fstab, /proc/filesystems |
| App Versions | The installed and available version of each Shanios component, and whether a newer one is already sitting in the cache | pacman -Q, pacman -Si |
| Printers | Queues, jobs and scan hardware. Read-only: the daemon is socket-activated and usually not running. KDE Plasma 6.7 has no printer panel at all | lpstat, /etc/cups |
| Camera | Capture devices, their formats and controls. Read-only: neither the PipeWire nor the legacy V4L stack runs as a service | v4l2-ctl, pw-cli |
| SMB | The shares testparm validates, the passdb accounts, and what holds ports 445 and 139. testparm -s hides defaults and does not list usershares — map to guest and friends are in the shipped file and absent from the dump | testparm -s, pdbedit -L -v |
| Service Discovery | mDNS and DNS-SD state. The socket is the switch: the service is D-Bus activated and never needs enabling | systemctl is-enabled avahi-daemon.socket, ss -ulpn |
| Compression (now a section of Btrfs) | What each btrfs filesystem is set to compress, and what compsize measures is already compressed. It is on the Btrfs page because compsize only measures btrfs: the measurement has no meaning without it. Needs root and refuses outright, so it never asks for a password. compsize is a separate package from btrfsprogs | compsize -b -x, findmnt |
| irqbalance | Whether the daemon runs, and where the kernel has pinned each interrupt. A single-CPU smp_affinity_list is a driver default, not evidence irqbalance ran | smp_affinity_list, irqbalance.env |
| ananicy-cpp | The priority daemon: unit state, its privilege set, and the rules it loads. /etc/ananicy.d ships empty, so zero rules is a real state, not a fault | ananicy-cpp, /etc/ananicy.d/ |
| Kernel Lockdown | Whether the kernel offers lockdown, what mode is in force, and what the boot requested. sbctl itself reports no lockdown state, and Shanios's Secure Boot system of record is gen-efi/mokutil, not sbctl | /sys/kernel/security/lockdown |
| TPM2 Boot Unlock (now a section of Encryption) | The second factor offered at boot. Available in the repos but not installed by Shanios, and it ships no PAM module — so this is boot unlock, not login 2FA. It is shown on passphrase-only machines too, which is where a boot second factor would matter most | tpm2-totp, dracut/modules.d/70tpm2-totp |
| Privileges | The system's polkit rules and admin groups — not Cassini's own, which installs none. .pkla is dead upstream; every real rule here is JavaScript from a package under /usr/share. Present-but-unreadable is reported apart from empty | /usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d, pkaction --version |
Three of these are worth knowing about because the answer is not where you would look. Cron cannot use crontab -l — that only ever means the calling user's table, and no tool lists the system crontabs — including /etc/crontab itself, whose lines carry an extra username field. Graphics reports the DRI_PRIME value that addresses each GPU and whether that card is currently awake, neither of which either settings app shows; it does not switch the session default, because switcheroo-control is a read-only property service with no call that changes anything, so per-app selection is switcherooctl launch -g N APP or prime-run, named on the page. A GPU with no driver bound is listed with an empty driver rather than hidden — that is what "present but unusable" looks like from underneath.
Encryption reads gen-efi pcrlock-status --json behind the same Check button, which answers the one question the page could previously only reason about: whether the TPM key is pinned to fixed PCR values (it is — gen-efi enrols with --tpm2-pcrs, the policy systemd-cryptenroll calls brittle) or bound to a policy hash. A firmware update strands a pinned key, and the page now says so from the machine rather than by inference.
Firmware deliberately installs nothing, and says why — a firmware update changes the machine's TPM2 PCR 0 and invalidates a disk set up for automatic unlock, so if you apply one, re-run Set Up on the Encryption page afterwards.
Passwords
Reading the system state needs no password. Anything that changes the system (an update, a rollback, a channel change, a health check, TPM or Secure Boot changes, a reset) asks for an administrator password first, through the desktop's normal polkit dialog. Updates and rollbacks keep the computer from sleeping until they finish.
Updating and going back
Updates & Rollback shows the version you run and the newest one on your channel. Update installs it into the other system slot; restart when asked. Roll Back… switches to the previous system (after a restart) — your files and settings are not affected. See Blue-Green Deployment and Update Channels.
Update and Boot Notifications
After you log in, the per-user shani-cassini-agent.timer checks the system two minutes later and then every two hours. It runs shani-cassini --agent, which reads shani-deploy --status --check --json and sends a notification when an update is available, a staged update needs a restart, or a boot failure was recorded.
Choose Open in a notification to start Shani Cassini on Updates & Rollback. The agent only checks and notifies. Installing an update, changing channels, and rolling back remain actions on that page.
To inspect the user service:
systemctl --user status shani-cassini-agent.timer
journalctl --user -u shani-cassini-agent.service -n 50Reset
Maintenance → Reset this computer runs shani-reset: it erases settings, user accounts and service data, keeps both system slots and (unless you choose otherwise) everything in /home, then restarts. You type reset to confirm — and wipe home as well if you chose to erase files.