Tag: Unix

I just wanted to share an experience with the FARAO software we recently published a paper about, and its compatibility with the GD and libpng libraries (used for creating PNG files). I have got questions from users about how to get this to work, and to test it out I decided to try to install it on my Mac. It turned out that it is nearly impossible to get this to work. These two packages are extremely picky with versions and dependencies. After trying for about on hour, I gave up and turned to my Linux machine. Surprisingly, I could not get it to work from scratch there either, despite that I have had it running (with some previous version combination) when we programmed and tested FARAO.

I find this extremely annoying myself, and I will try to look into other solutions for PNG or JPEG output from FARAO. In the mean time, I can only recommend to instead use the EPS output option, which produces more nice-looking figures and is considerably easier to set up. I am sorry about this and hope to be able to provide a better solution soon.

I have added some software I have written to this page (see link to Software at the top of the page). Among these is the useful little Unix/Linux utility blastgrep, which functions as a grep adopted for extracting useful information from BLAST-reports. I wrote it recently as I increasingly use complicated combinations of piped Unix-commands to do the same thing. blastgrep makes it all more easy. Use it as you wish, and if you do, please tell me about its bugs (hopefully none…)