Fortune

Fortunoid is a Plasma Widget that serves as a frontend GUI for the fortune package.

Installing the Fortunoid widget package by

sudo apt-get install plasma-widget-fortunoid

will also install the fortune package. If only the fortune package is desired (which can be run in a command-line terminal), it can be installed by itself:

sudo apt-get install fortune

The fortune module can be customized.

• The quotations themselves are stored in the /usr/share/games/fortunes folders.

• There are multiple categories of quotations, and the file for each category can be edited directly.

• When using the command-line, categories of quotations can be selected merely by specifying them. Example:

fortune zippy science

• There are many options for the command-line fortune utility (see here). Any or all of these command-line options can be entered as an argument in the Fortunoid widget.

Adding categories of fortunes (fortune modules)

• See this list of the original fortune modules (categories).
• Other modules can often be found by a Google search for fortune-mod.
• Wikiquotes is an online repository for quotations. A webpage can easily be copied to a text file, for conversion into a fortune data file (see below). An example page is Wikiquotes -- Zen proverbs.
• See this brief tutorial.

• Make sure fortune-mod is installed:

sudo apt-get install fortune-mod

• Change to the fortune directory:

cd /usr/share/games/fortunes

• Edit a category text file with quotations separated by % symbols:

I reject your reality and substitute my own...
%
This is one of those "What the hell am I doing?" moments, over!
%
We got a robot in the water, he's stuffed with tuna and it's just another day here at Mythbusters.

For example, save this text file as newcategory1.

• There is also a UTF-8 file which is merely a symbolic link to the text file:

sudo ln -s newcategory1 newcategory1.u8

• Convert the text file into a data file for use by fortune.

sudo strfile newcategory1 newcategory1.dat

• Select newcategory1 as a command-line option or as an argument in Fortunoid.