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Asus appears to have launched its new software download center for Eee PC users. The site has over 3,400 free Liinux applications including games, media players, and office applications. There’s just one problem. There doesn’t appear to be any easy way to install these programs on a current generation Eee PC.

Each program has a handy little “install” button next to it. But what happens when you click install is your computer attempts to download a file with a CNR extension. CNR stands for “click n run,” and it’s a file type designed for the Linspire Linux operating system. The idea is that you can click a file on a web page to download and install applications in Linux just as easily as you would in Windows. No need to type anything into a command line (or fire up a separate application like Synaptic).

But right now, Xandros doesn’t support CNR. And if you’ve got an Eee PC running Linux, it’s runnning Xandros (unless you installed your favorite Linux distro all by your lonesome). So what gives? Well, Xandros bought Linspire a little while back, so it’s possible that future versions of the Xandros OS will support CNR. And it’s possible that a software update could be pushed out to Xandros and Eee PC users fairly soon that will let them take advantage of the Eee PC Download center. But I have no idea why the site went live a few days ago when it’s pretty much  useless at the moment.

[via Engadget and EeeUser Forums]