This week's "Linux Product Insider" features the ROGCon Republic of Gamers Convention, IBM's Project Big Green Gets Greener, Rickford Grant's Ubuntu for Non-Geeks, 3rd Edition , Terra Soft's YDL PowerStation and Bergfrid Marie Skaara's eZ Publish Advanced Content Management.

Here is this week's Linux product news:

ASUS/Intel Republic of Gamers Convention
While your non-geek friends and family will badger you into a beach vacation, resist their entreaties and follow your instincts to the ASUS/Intel Republic of Gamers Convention (ROGCon) instead. The goal of ROGCon is "to bring classic LAN gaming back, and to honor the gaming enthusiasts who help fuel technology advancements." With over 40,000 square feet of BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer), BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop), tournament and exhibition space, ASUS and Intel are expecting over 1,000 gamers and spectators to the event. ROGCon participants will have the chance to game for fun, participate in tournaments to win over $70,000 worth of prizes, and test drive the latest in mobile and desktop technologies from ASUS and Intel. ROGCon will take place from July 18 to 20, 2008, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Dallas, Texas.

http://promos.asus.com/campaign/t.aspx?n=81&l=439

IBM Expands Project Big Green
When IBM talks, it's hard to fit it all into a paragraph. However the essence of this latest IBM announcement is an expansion of Project Big Green, a year-old technology initiative to save energy in the data center. After a $1 billion R&D investment, Big Blue is rolling out an array of new services, technologies and financing to help enterprises to build 'greener' infrastructures and save money at the same time. A new core technology in Project Big Green is the modular data center design, which can reduce energy consumption up to 50%, as well as reduce implementation times significantly, says IBM. Other forthcoming green tech innovations include water-cooled computer chips, storage management tools for real-time power consumption management, carbon-footprint management tools and other software capabilities to help businesses achieve their green goals and optimize infrastructure, workloads and people for energy efficiency. Finally IBM Global Financing announced an all-inclusive financial package that allows customers to implement green technologies while allowing cash-flow advantages.

http://www.ibm.com/green

Rickford Grant's Ubuntu for Non-Geeks, 3rd Edition (No Starch)
You may not need this book, but the friends and family you convert to Linux just might. It's the 3rd edition of Rickford Grant's Ubuntu for Non-Geeks from No Starch Press. The book's subtitle describes its philosophy well, i.e. A Pain-Free, Project-Based, Get-Things-Done Guidebook. No Starch's publisher, Bill Pollock, says that the book lets new users interact with their operating system, rather than just look at it." Pollock adds that "many of the projects can accomplished with just a few mouse clicks, and as readers complete the projects they're actually customizing and building their system." Topics covered include obtaining free software, connecting to networks, configuring peripherals, working with various media, system customization, working with the command line and more.

http://www.nostarch.com

Terra Soft Solutions YDL PowerStation
Well-known for its PlayStation 3 cluster, Terra Soft Solution recently released the YDL
PowerStation, a robust deskside tower that brings the Power architecture to both the workstation and server at an affordable price. The machine offers four 2.5GHz IBM 970MP cores, up to 32GB RAM, dual Gigabit ethernet, four USB 2.0 ports, integrated ultra-fast SAS with 4 hot-swap bays, both PCI-E and
PCI-X slots, and support for x86 architecture graphics cards. Terra Soft calls the YDL PowerStation "the ideal replacement for the now aging Apple PowerMac G5 product family" and that "all Linux code optimized for the former G4 and G5 systems will readily migrate to the PowerStation." Yellow Dog Linux v6.0 comes pre-installed.

http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com

eZ Publish Advanced Content Management by Bergfrid Marie Skaara
The developers of eZ Publish - via its eZ Press book imprint - have released eZ Publish Advanced Content Management, an advanced guide to managing content with eZ Publish 4.0. The book's author is Bergfrid Marie Skaara, who has written previous books for eZ Press. The book builds on concepts from the earlier book eZ Publish Content Management Basics. Some of the topics covered include user management and the permission system; URL, cache, and extension management; tag clouds and blogs; and managing products in a Web shop. The book is available from eZ's Web site, and PDF version will be made available for sale six months after the release of the print version.

http://ez.no/store/books

To send feedback on this article, or to send product news, please contact Products Editor, James Gray at jgray@linuxjournal.com.