Granular Linux

Granular is a Linux Operating System that is intended to be as user-friendly and flexible as possible.

For potential newcomers unfamiliar with Linux, Granular is an excellent starting point and one that will make their introduction to Linux, as easy and smooth as possible. To this end, Granular linux purposefully includes built in instruction manuals and 'How To' guides. These have been designed to be as easy to read as they are useful. At the same time Granular, is also attractive to both regular or advanced Linux users in that it provides a collection of useful command line and administrative tools.

LINUX FLEXIBILITY

Granular Linux makes it as easy as possible to do all the familiar things you would do on a Windows PC with the same benefits, minus the costs of a commerical Operating system licencing and upgrade headaches. Functions such as surfing the internet, writing articles, making presentations, chatting with friends, listening to music, managing images or simply playing games are all catered for.

This is the strength of Linux and Granular in particular, because all such activities from the most simple to the most creative, are carried out through completely free and updatable Linux based software.

LINUX DESKTOPS.

A notable feature of Granular is that it unites various desktop environments, like KDE and Enlightenment, together onto one CD/DVD. Switching between them is easy.

Inception
The Granular Linux Project kicked off in October 2006. In the beginning, a news website was launched on 5th December, under the domain http://www.granular-linux.com/main/. The first public release of Granular was the version 0.12 which was officially released and made available for download on 31st December 2006.

NOTE: Recently, the main website was shifted to another server under a new domain name. The new website address is: http://www.granularlinux.com/

Origins
Granular is based on the very popular Linux distribution PCLinuxOS.

Ideology behind the project
The main idea behind the birth of the project, was to redefine the application set included in PCLinuxOS to some extent and to introduce the idea of having more than one major desktop environment on a single LiveCD. The latter idea was implemented in the second version release of Granular, version 0.25.

Variants
The two official variants of Granular are:
 * Granular LiveCD
 * Granular FunWorks edition (LiveDVD)

The Granular LiveCD is the main focus of the project. This release consists of the combination of KDE and Xfce desktop environments, along with a set of applications suited to most Linux newbies and regular users. According to the latest policy of the Granular Project, there would be only one LiveCD release in a year followed by a corresponding "FunWorks" edition release.

The Granular FunWorks edition is the DVD extension of the LiveCD released in a year. The 2007 release of this Granular variant hosts of four desktop environments along with a huge set of applications and softwares; a total of 5.6 GB packed in a 1.92 GB DVD!

Some important applications in Granular

 * Granular Control Center - used to manage your system from a central point
 * Synaptic Package Manager - used to install new softwares from the repositories
 * Mozilla Firefox - the default web browser
 * Xine - codecs library which enables playback of virtually all known multimedia formats. It's the backend for some great multimedia players, like Amarok (audio player) and Kaffeine (video player)
 * Kopete - the default chat client. Supports many instant messaging protocols, like Yahoo!, AIM, GTalk, MSN etc.
 * GIMP - very popular image editing software
 * digiKam - photo management application
 * KOffice suite - replacement to Microsoft Office. It is a collection of softwares like KWord, KPresenter, KSpread.

Releases till now
The following is the list of all the releases of Granular made till date, along with their codenames:
 * Granular v1.0 - Esto Vox
 * Granular FunWorks 2007 - Esto Vello
 * Granular v0.90 - Esto Vello
 * Granular v0.25 - Synapse
 * Granular v0.12 - Synapse