Raiden's Realm: Review: Granular Linux 1.0

Review: Granular Linux 1.0 (Page 1 of 1)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Mar 25, 2009 at 08:04am
Section: Reviews
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Back in September of 2007 I took a look at what was then the 0.9 version of Granular. It was a pretty good distribution at the time, even for being only beta quality. I'm not sure what's taking so long to reach the 1.0 status, but it's finally here, and we're about to give it a spin and see what the full version looks like and how well it'll work for new users.

LiveCD

Granular Linux comes by default as a LiveCD. It's based on PcLinuxOS (2009 I believe), but is also very highly customized and uses some very non-PCLOS additions to enhance the user experience. Granular's motto is “Linux Made Easy”. How easy is it? Well, a lot of that depends on your opinion of easy.

But I think that what you will see will definitely give you a feeling that easy is the goal of this distro. To get started, you're definitely greeted with easy as you're only asked to choose your keyboard and then login as either root or guest. (login info for both is available in the upper left hand corner of the window)

Boot-up and load times for the LiveCD are reasonable, although nothing to write home about. In general they're about middle of the road for LiveCD boot and load times. Once you're on the desktop, you're greeted with Granular's traditional taskbar on top layout, and a limited number of desktop icons.

The KDE menu, unlike the oddly designed one available in the 0.9 version, uses the newer kickoff style five pane menu, which does have a few glitches in it, making it act a little funny, but otherwise it seemed fairly typical for the newer style menu layout.

Menu layout is in many ways similar to that available on PCLOS 2009, but there are also some things which are unique to Granular Linux. The software list is also similar to PCLOS 2009, however, Granular also maintains it's own software repositories, so the available software is not entirely dependent on PCLOS, even though it uses their repositories.

Desktop speed and performance is reasonable, but stability is very good. The available list of software on Granular is reasonable, but does include a lot of the core applications that people are familiar with, including Firefox, Abiword and more.

Install

The installer for Granular is the standard PCLOS Draklive installer, so really there's no difference here between Granular and PCLOS. You pretty much just point, click, next just like you would in PCLOS, with the only thing you really have to do is choose your partitioning. You won't need to enter your login details until first boot.

Install was reasonably flawless, although I did succeed in crashing Draklive a few times, so stability in that area needs some work. Install takes about 20 minutes and is pretty hands off overall. Once it's done, you can reboot and begin using your new system.

Overview

First boot is reasonably fast, and you're greeted with a screen asking for your credentials. Oddly, I succeeded in crashing that as well. I'm not sure why the system is stable in other areas, but crash on configuration screens.

System speed overall is good. Multimedia support is also good, as is hardware detection, since it found everything I had with no problems. One interesting addition I found under the system menu was two links. One was for making a remastered LiveCD, and the other for a LiveUSB.

The system uses KDE 3.5.10 along with the Linux Kernel 2.6.26, and the latest Xorg release. Configuration on Granular is fairly easy, and has almost the same layout in the two control panels (KDE and the system control panel) as PCLOS does. The system control panel is even identical to the one on PCLOS, mostly because it's just the PCLOS control panel rebranded for Granular.

Compiz utterly hated me, and would not run. Of course, given some of the trouble I've had with it lately in general, that's not one bit surprising really and is unlikely to be a Granular issue. Multimedia support was a bit scarce. The list of available multimedia features is a bit thin and many big standbys are missing. Amarok is still present, as is Kaffein and Smplayer, but other than that, the pickings are rather slim.

Now on the office application side, I found it rather odd that the developers used the Open Office icon, and then packaged Koffice and Abiword in there instead. I find that a bit deceptive and confusing, especially to new users who may have become accustomed to seeing the OO logo. It's almost like using deceptive advertising.

The application list in other areas is a bit thin too, with a few standbys such as Firefox and Konqueror, but lacking in Pidgin or Kmail. Thunderbird was present though, so you can rest easy in that area. Another interesting surprise was to find Pan present in the newsreaders section. This has to be one of the few distros I've seen that actually packages Pan natively, although more have begun to of late.

Conclusion

Overall I'm not terribly impressed with this release of Granular. It just feels like not enough thought was put into the final version and it could have used to go through a bit more user and stability testing, even though a lot of stuff is very stable. However, unstable config windows is a deal breaker.

I can't say that I saw any real show stoppers, but what I did see was enough to keep me from recommending this distribution for now. I may at some point in the future as the distribution grows, but for now it's got a thumbs down from me.

If you want to learn more and/or develop your own opinion on the quality of this distro, you can check out their homepage here: http://www.granularlinux.com/

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