Larry Cafiero (lcafiero)
About me
My name is Larry Cafiero. I'm 50, and I live in Scotts Valley (Santa Cruz County), California, U.S.A., with my wife, Kyoko, and our 10-year-old daughter, Mirano, a Linux Chick in training. I'm a journalist by profession: Currently, I am a copy editor on the news desk at the Santa Cruz Sentinel. More importantly (to me at least), I'm a returning student at Cabrillo College, currently studying in the Unix/Linux Administrator Certificate program. I the former president and current secretary/treasurer of the Cabrillo College GNU/Linux Users Group.
I consider myself a FOSS evangelist after finding out about -- and using -- FOSS programs during my campaign as the Green Party candidate for California Insurance Commissioner in 2006 (270,218 votes, 3.2 percent). Since then, I have published Open Source and Free Software Reporter (http://www.opensourcereporter.net) and I currently blog as Larry the Free Software Guy (http://larrythefreesoftwareguy.wordpress.com).
After several months of distro-hopping -- I started out with Debian and have leaned toward its derivatives for a most of this time -- it wasn't until the beginning of this year that I started using Fedora on a regular basis to help test a GNU/Linux version of dbEntrance, a MySQL browser currently on the market for Macintosh.
Introducing Fedora at Cabrillo College
Karsten Wade, another Fedora ambassador, and I introduced Fedora 9 at the Cabrillo College GNU/Linux Users Group installfest in May 2008. I remarked to Karsten that Santa Cruz may not be big enough for two ambassadors, but he disagreed and urged me to apply. So here I am.
Needless to say, we'll also bring Cambridge to Cabrillo when it's ready.
Why I use Fedora
Fedora is an outstanding distro, and it works for me on several levels. As a long-time Mac guy (I still am, although I am warming up to Intel with GNU/Linux), perhaps the most important point to me is the fact that Fedora continues to develop for the PowerPC platform. This is smart, because there is so much Macintosh hardware out there that's still working, good as new, which has been abandoned by Apple because their OS progress leaves this perfectly good hardware behind.
Join me in Lindependence 2008
My primary project until July is organizing the Lindependence 2008 project in Felton, California, U.S.A., where GNU/Linux and FOSS are being introduced to a town of 6,000 in the Santa Cruz Mountains during the course of the month of July. Three meetings/installfests were held in July 2008, and approximately 30 people converted to GNU/Linux right off the bat. We're monitoring their progress as time goes on.
We will be doing more Lindependence events going forward -- the next event will be in Portland on Oct. 25.
Miscellanea
This fall, I will be working with other Cabrillo College students in developing a school-based distro called Seahawk GNU/Linux (named after Cabrillo's mascot), which will be based on, you guessed it, Red Hat/Fedora . . . . I am a big San Francisco Giants fan, and a fan of baseball in general . . . . Last year, I ordered a specialty license plate for my car, a 1994 Volkswagen Jetta, which reads "GNU LNUX" (and you can see it here: http://larrythefreesoftwareguy.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/wearing-your-loyalties-on-your-bumper/ ) . . . More to follow.