Linspire announced availability this week of the Linspire 6.0 desktop Linux operating system, marking the company’s first commercial release in more than two years.Built on Ubuntu, Linspire 6.0 adds licensed proprietary drivers, codecs and software in its core distribution to offer a better user experience, the company said. Improved support for hardware, file types and multimedia is featured for MP3, Java, ATI, nVidia, WiFi and other technologies. Microsoft software is incorporated including Windows Media, True Type Fonts and Open XML translators, allowing the OpenOffice productivity suite to edit Microsoft Word documents. The suite is pre-installed with Linspire. Linspire has a patent covenant arrangement with Microsoft, intended to foster interoperability between Windows and Linspire. But the open source community has criticized this arrangement as well as a similar one made between Microsoft and Novell. These agreements have been viewed by some as a concession to Microsoft.Linspire 6.0 also features the beta release of the CNR Client for software delivery. This offers access to open source and commercial applications such as StarOffice from Sun Microsoft and CodeWeaver Crossover Office. Linspire 6.0 is available for download for $49.95. Technology Industry