Linspire, the company behind desktop Linux operating systems Linspire and Freespire, has teamed up with US PC manufacturer Mirus Innovations to offer a $199 Linux PC.

The unit comes with Freespire 2.0, a community-influenced Ubuntu-based Linux distribution designed to be powerful enough for sophisticated Linux users and developers, yet easy enough for someone new to Linux.

The PC, available through Sears.com, has an Intel Celeron 420 1.6GHz processor, 1GB memory, an 80GB hard drive, card reader, modem and CDRW, and comes with keyboard, speakers and mouse.

The $199 PC is also the first Linux PC pre-installed with the newly released beta CNR Client. Launched in December, CNR.com is a free one-click software delivery service requiring no registration to use.

CNR.com users can 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.