"The Green Penguin" is a new blog devoted to ‘green’ IT related to Linux (though at times loosely). This week´s topic is about Google and General Electric´s recently announced plan to promote a ‘smart’ electric power grid and thus encourage greater use of renewable energy.

Slax is a fast, small, portable Linux distribution taking a modular approach that gives you the ability to easily add on your favorite software. Just download a module with the software, copy it to Slax -- no installing, no configuring.

See it in action:

The "Linux Product Insider" features: ”Free the Penguins” Virtualization in Schools Initiative; ZaReason's Breeze 3110 PC; Gimpel's FlexeLint for C/C++; Glacier Computer's Everest Rugged Industrial Computer; Alternative Technology's Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support.

Linux Journal's Associate Editor Shawn Powers chats with Data Domain about their deduplication storage systems which optimize data protection and disaster recovery (DR) performance. The folks at Data Domain offer a range of products to meet the nearline storage needs of enterprises of all sizes, as they seek to reduce costs and simplify data management.

The August 2th "Linux Product Insider" features Memopal Online Backup, gNewSense 2.1, Super Talent Pico D USB Drive, SEH's PS56 WLAN Print Server and the new book Building Embedded Linux Systems

Associate Editor Shawn Powers recently had the opportunity to speak with Fujitsu about their latest Linux offerings.

This "Linux Product Insider" features the book FIRST LEGO League, iStor Networks' integraSuite/MC Management Center, WaveMaker's Visual Ajax Studio 4.0, Perforce 2008.1 SCM System and FST's FancyPants SDK.

Here's what's new and noteworthy this week in Linux and open source:

One could play for hours with Google Trends (trends.google.com). Not only does it show the spikes and slopes of search volume across time since the beginning of 2004, but it also lists the current top ten regions, cities and languages for each search. You can search for multiple keywords, comma-separated, and see colored lines for each. The results are usually more interesting than revealing.

This "Linux Product Insider" features The Linux Foundation’s End-User Collaboration Summit, KDE 4.1, Sun’s Web Stack, RedPost’s Sign and the book Ad Hoc Networking.

This week's "Linux Product Insider" features the CherryPal C100 PC, DragonflyBSD 2.0, SansDigital’s MobileNAS MN4L+, Mandriva and Precedent Technologies’ TechSurfer PC and Joey Lott et al.’s Adobe AIR in Action

Purple Labs, a company based in France with a multinational management team, is pushing Linux mobile phones outward in capabilities and downward in price.

Products Editor James Gray recently sat down for a virtual gab fest with Håkon Wium Lie Chief Technology Officer of Opera. They discussed Opera 9.5, Opera's history, why Linux users should choose Opera and much more.

This "Linux Product Insider" features the Robot, Gizmo & Gadget Show, Microway's NumberSmasher vSMP servers, Excito's Bubba Two Home Server, Van Lindberg's Intellectual Property and Open Source and Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization.

The July 11th "Linux Product Insider" features the Online Dictionary of Engineering Science & Tech, Curl Data Kit, High Performance MySQL, Teach Yourself C++ in One Hour a Day and Sans Digital AccuNAS AN2L.

this "Linux Product Insider" features "PDF Gets ISO Standard", Imation's Atom Flash Drive, Sabayon Linux 3.5, VariCAD 2008 2.0, Arkeia's EdgeFort 500 Series Backup Appliance and the book Investigatng Digital Crime.

This "Linux Product Insider" features IronKey Secure Flash Drives, Jedox's Palo spreadsheet server, Tony Mullen's new Blender book, Hyperic's CloudStatus, Syuzi Pakhchyan's Fashioning Technology and Joel Spolsky's More Joel on Sofware.

Google Tech Talks brings us this presentation describing the rate of development for the Linux kernel, and how the development model is set up to handle such a large and diverse developer population and huge rate of change.

This "Linux Product Insider" features CrossOver Linux 7.0, Skype 4.0 beta, Scoofers Search Engine, BakBone Software's NetVault, MEN Micro's DC1 Rugged Display Computer and PostPath Server HA Edition v2.

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.

This week's "Linux Product Insider" features Myah OS, Intalio's user conference, Movial's IXS Toolkit, the book Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings and Scenery, PIKA's telephony appliances and ACT/Technico's SATA PMCDisk.