Contents
--------

        1. Installation and usage
        2. Rebuilding
	3. Conversion to HTML
        4. Availability
        5. Acknowledgments
        6. Contacting the author

1. Installation and usage
-------------------------

To install these fortunes, copy the files

at.linux
at.linux.dat
fvl
fvl.dat
rss
rss.dat
tretkowski
tretkowski.dat

to your fortunes directory. This location is not standardized.
Some possibilities:

/usr/games/lib/fortunes
/usr/share/games/fortune
/usr/share/games/fortunes

To use it, simply type:

fortune fvl

On some systems fortune is not reachable through $PATH by default.
On RedHat you might try /usr/games/fortune instead.

Note that these pages are encoded in ISO_8859-15.

2. Rebuilding
-------------

The perl script 'mkfortune' is shipped in a separate package 'mkfortune'.

mkfortune fvl.id > fvl
strfile fvl

You also need

perl 5
Text::Iconv >= 1.2       http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=Text-Iconv
MIME::Base64 >= 2.12     http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=Base64
GNU wget
HTTP access to www.google.com
a file system that accepts '?' and other characters in a file name

strfile is part of the fortune package.
On some systems it is located in directory /usr/sbin/,
although it does not require root permissions.

mkfortune saves every downloaded message in the current directory.
Should the file already exist it is not downloaded again.
I recommend creating and changing into a new directory before
executing mkfortune.

You can install the man page by copying the file mkfortune.1 to an
appropriate directory. Some possibilities:

/usr/local/man/man1/
/usr/share/man/man1
/usr/man/man1/

3. Conversion to HTML
---------------

You can convert the output of 'mkfortune' to HTML with 'html.sed',
also part of package 'mkfortune'.

The first fortune must be prefixed by a line consisting of '%'
(and nothing else). Fortunes must be separated by lines consisting
of '%' (and nothing else).
A trivial example (only one cookie):

( echo '%'; /usr/games/fortune fvl ) | ./html.sed > incomplete.html

4. Availability
---------------

You can always get the latest version from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fortune-mod-fvl

5. Acknowledgments
------------------

The fortunes were extracted from archived Usenet postings at
www.google.com. Many thanks to their authors, especially
Felix von Leitner (http://www.fefe.de).

6. Contacting the author
------------------------

Where author means author of the fortune file and the download
tool, mkfortune. Suggestions, questions, comments, patches:

alba@users.sourceforge.net 
