Linspire president and CEO Kevin Carmony, the guy who cut one of those patent protection deals with Microsoft, has - poof! - disappeared replaced by the company's sales chief Larry Kettler.

Linspire has said nothing about the transition to its third CEO since it started. It merely canned a quote by Kettler with his new title in a press release issued Wednesday. A call to Linspire has gone unanswered.

The press release said Linspire, which is moving to Ubuntu, has released Freespire 2.0, the freebie code that isn't patent protected under its arrangement with Microsoft.

It takes the new Ubuntu 7.04, the same code Dell is using, and garnishes it with licensed proprietary drivers, codecs and applications that have no open source equivalent like Flash, Adobe Acrobat, MP3, Windows Media files and Wi-Fi.

In a curtsey to the interoperability side of its Microsoft deal, the stuff includes Open XML translators so OpenOffice can open and edit Microsoft Word .doc files.

Linspire calls it its most advanced Linux to date and, because of its mixed technologies, a more complete turnkey solution for mainstream desktop computing.

"Everything is cutting-edge, utilizing the latest core technologies from the kernel to KDE," it said, "with the infrastructure in place to keep Freespire updated and current, moving forward." - at least as long as it can avoid GPL 3 code.