I lost some time (half an hour or so) trying to understand what was going on on my server (juggling with permissions and so) because of this:

| #!/home/pistacchio/webapps/repo1/fossil | repository:/home/pistacchio/webapps/repo1/repo/repo1

It seemed to me to be a good .cgi, but i didn't leave the space between "repository:" and the path, resulting in a "Unable to find or open the project repository" error.

I think fossil should be a bit more elastic about this.