Linspire, developer of the commercial Linspire and Freespire community desktop Linux operating systems, released its initial usage numbers from the December launch of CNR.com beta, a standardized Web 2.0-based Linux software delivery service for desktop Linux users worldwide.

CNR.com is designed to normalize the process of finding, installing, and updating Linux software for both Debian and RPM-based Linux distributions. The new and free beta CNR Service is currently available for Freespire 2.0, Linspire 6.0, Ubuntu 7.04 & 7.10 and will expand to provide support for all popular Linux distributions including (alphabetically) Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and others.

Since the launch of CNR.com beta last month, over 20,000 new CNR users have downloaded and installed the beta CNR Client. In addition, over 250,000 software programs, packages and libraries were downloaded and installed at an 89.9% successful installation rate.

“Early usage numbers clearly show CNR.com is solving a problem,” said Larry Kettler, President and CEO. “Finding, learning and one-click installing of software applications saves desktop Linux users time, money and eliminates a lot of frustration for the non-technical user.”

As the open source ecosystem for desktop Linux software continues to grow in terms of the number and diversity of projects, the ability for the user to find software and learn about updates continues to be a challenge, which is further compounded when each Linux distribution uses a specialized package management system.

CNR.com is designed to solve this problem by aggregating the open source software repositories into a single web site and by providing an open web services interface where any distribution can utilize these services to easily find, install and update software. Additionally, CNR.com provides an open source desktop client for those who would like to use it as their package manager while retaining traditional command line functionality.

CNR.com, a free service requiring no registration to use, allows users to search for applications by title, popularity, user rating, category, and function. An open source client for each supported distribution is then used to add the one-click installation as well as auto-updating functionality.

This new multi-distribution CNR Technology standardizes the installation process for the user without requiring any new or altered packaging systems. CNR.com uses standard .deb and .rpm files, while shielding the user from the complexity of these packaging systems. This allows distribution developers to continue using their same packaging methods and the varying distributions to continue with their normal release management practices. CNR adds server and client side intelligence to overcome the common dependency challenges presented by the current packaging systems without the need to alter existing release policies and procedures.