1This program uses Forward Error Correction (FEC) based on Vandermonde (VDM)
2matrices to recover lost blocks of files.  Its primary application is
3intended to be in recovering data from unreliable media such as diskettes.
4(Note that you must write the data to the diskette using this program
5in the first place in order to be able to recover the data!)
6
7To install, configure and make install.  Three programs are copied into
8$bindir:
9	vdmfec
10	vdm_encode
11	vdm_decode
12these files are all hard links to each other, the latter being equivalent
13to calling 'vdmfec -d'.
14
15CFLAGS and LDFLAGS default to -O3 and -s, resp.  For debugging you might
16want to 'configure CFLAGS="-O2 -g" LDFLAGS=""'.
17
18The Notes file gives the file format.
19
20VDMFEC is based on the Vandermonde FEC C code written by Luigi Rizzo.
21The home page for fec.c is http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/fec.html
22
23The files README.fec, fec.3, fec.c, fec.h, and fec_ccr.ps.gz are from
24Rizzo's 980624 distribution, sans assembly code, and with a few changes
25to make for better autoconfiguration.  The vdmfec code will only work
26with GF_BITS=8 (because the block id is stored as a byte).
27