Arka(1)

NAME
Arka - A GTK+ frontend to command line programs

DESCRIPTION

Arka is a program that (1) serves as a graphical interface for the programs from the GP package (see http://www.bioinformatics.org/genpak/) and virtually for any other command line program (2) has some funtions on it's own. The main scope of the program is the manipulation and visualisation of DNA / RNA / protein sequences, but arka is a suitable, however humble, interface for anything from blasta through make to zip.

The GP package contains many command-line utilities which fullfill a whole bunch of tasks (from DNA sequence searches to restriction analysis and determining the melting temperature of oligonucleotides). While those programs are convenient to use in batch processing and CGI scripts (which was the purpose of those programs), they lack a nice GUI.

Arka remembers the options for the command-line programs and knows what both the programs and the options do. Besides, it has some gadgets on its own. It requires GTK+, but doesn't need GNOME. Also, it is small and quick: look, I write and use my programs on an old 486 laptop. It should run like hot butter on your computer.

To learn more how to use Arka, just start it and select the "Readme" item from the menu "Help".

DIAGNOSTICS

In case of problems, start arka with the -d option for example like that:

arka -d > arka.log

Then mail me the arka.log file.

BUGS

I'm sure there are numerous bugs, but I try to fix anything I find. There are two problems I am aware at the moment. First, the text windows are not horizontally scrollable. This is not a problem of Arka, but of the gtk_text widget. The second problem is what I think is a serious memory leak in graph.c. I will fix it. Some day. And remember: don't use Arka when you are logged in as root (this holds for all GTK+ programs and is not a bad idea for the majority of GUI programs).

AUTHOR

I wonder whether these tools will be useful to anyone but me. On the other hand, they are useful for me (I wrote Arka because I couldn't remember all the options of the programs I wrote, and because I needed the 3D graph part to visualise DNA structures). So, whether you like the program or not, please do mail me (like, to save me the effort of writing another README file). My address is january@bioinformatics.org; programs homepage is http://www.bioinformatics.org/genpak/.