When Linspire 6.0 is released next month, it will include the fruits of the recently announced marriage between Linspire and Microsoft. Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony says he has been in talks with Microsoft for about a year and a half before reaching an agreement.

It's a bit later than Linspire had planned, but the company's CEO Kevin Carmony told DesktopLinux that the new commercial version of its Linux distribution, Linspire 6.0, along with the free version, Freespire 2.0, and its revised CNR (click-and-run) software update system, should be out before August.

n an interview today with Linux-Watch, controversial Linux leader Kevin Carmony confirmed rumors that he had resigned as CEO of desktop Linux vendor Linspire on July 31 [...] Carmony also said his resignation, contrary to some rumors, had nothing to do with any disagreement with Linspire's primary owner Michael Robertson, or with fallout from either of Linspire's recent deals with Microsoft.

According to multiple sources close to Linux distributor Linspire, former CEO Kevin Carmony was not the only executive to leave Linspire at the end of July.

After months of hard work, Linspire is proud to announce the beta release of CNR.com. On the 23rd of January, 2007, Linspire announced for the first time that they are working to extend their CNR (Click 'N Run) website for other popular Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE and Debian. The CNR service has already been available
for all Linspire and Freespire users. Kevin Carmony, the President and CEO of Linspire Inc., stated that he had enough with complaints from MS Windows and Mac users about Linux, and that there are too many distributions and each one has a different way of installing software: "When we started Linspire, we knew that we'd need to overcome this complexity. This led to Linspire's CNR ("Click 'N Run") technology."

Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony was pretty gung-ho about the company's upcoming release back in June. He said it would "fill some key holes in our current offering." Unfortunately Linspire 6, released last week, lacks the refinements you'd expect in a distro you pay $50 to download.

Still no direct response from Linspire regarding the reported resignation of Kevin Carmony, although the company has confirmed the accuracy of the report and appointed a new president and CEO.

Kevin Carmony: "I've known Chris Pirillo for several years... he was surprised to learn about some of the "weird stuff" that was going on with Linspire, so he invited me to his live chat room for an Interview. I tried to be as candid as possible with my perspective as to how Linspire came to an end."

In my blog yesterday, I shared how Michael Robertson had sold Linspire to Xandros without a shareholder meeting or any input from the 100 some-odd shareholders. Today, Xandros' CEO, Andy Typaldos, did a Q & A (spin) about this deal. I thought I'd add some additional "color" to some of his answers.