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## The Karma Home Page

Karma is a toolkit for interprocess communications, authentication, encryption, graphics display, user interface and manipulating the Karma network data structure. It contains KarmaLib (the structured libraries and API) and a large number of modules (applications) to perform many standard tasks. A suite of visualisation tools are distributed with the library.

For a more detailed description of the Karma Library, read the Karma Library Readme file.

If you have the Karma HTML documentation files installed under /usr/local/karma/www then click here to use that copy: it will be much faster. The main Karma home page documents the current beta version of Karma, so there may be a few new things there which your local copy does not have. The documents you are reading are for Karma version 1.7.25
A mirror site is maintained at the Radio Astronomy Group , Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Calgary.

There is also an update policy document which describes how things may change from one release or version of Karma to the next. Karma is freely available, and is distributed under the GNU GPL and LGPL (applications and libraries, respectively).

## Karma Documentation

The Karma documentation is available here.

## Download

Click here to get the current runtime distributions of Karma. Alternatively, you can check out the Karma ftp site (mirrored in Calgary, Canada), which contains older runtime distributions as well as source code.

## Screen Snapshots

Screen snapshots of some of the visualisation tools have been taken, and are available here. To get documentation on these tools please see the User Manual.

- kvis, the general-purpose image/movie display tool which can load multiple datasets, display multiple windows, overlay contours, annotations, show multiple overlaid profiles, and much more
- koords, a tool for applying a co-ordinate system header to an image
- kpvslice, a tool for interactively displaying position-velocity slices
- krenzo, a tool for displaying contours of channel maps
- kshell, a tool for finding and analysing expanding shells
- khuei, a tool for displaying complex or amplitude/phase data using hue and intensity
- kslice_3d, a tool for displaying three orthogonal slices through a volume

## Mailing Lists

There are two mailing lists available. In either case, send a line in the body of the message thus:

    Subscribe LIST [ADDRESS]

where `LIST` is the mailing list you want to subscribe to, and `[ADDRESS]` is an optional email address you wish to subscribe. If you do not specify the email address, your reply address will be subscribed.

Send an email to to be put on the mailing for announcements for public releases of Karma. Public releases contain source code as well as binary distributions, and usually come out once or twice a year. The name of the mailing list is `karma`.

Send an email to to be put on the mailing for announcements for beta releases of Karma. Beta releases contain only binary distributions, and usually come out once or twice a month. Beta releases are intended to provide early access to new features and bugfixes for the public releases. The name of the mailing list is `karma-beta`.

## References

If you use this software and its use leads to a publication, please let me know, and include one of the references below in your publication:

- Gooch, R.E., 1995, "Space and the Spaceball", in Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems IV, ASP Conf. Series vol. 77, ed. R.A. Shaw, H.E. Payne, & J.J.E. Hayes, ASP, San Francisco, p.144-147, ISBN 0-937707-96-1
- Gooch, R.E., 1995, "Visualisation: from Data to Understanding", in Workshop on Applications of Radio Science 1995, Australian Academy of Science through the National Committee for Radio Science ISBN 1-86408-030-2
- Gooch, R.E., 1996, "Karma: a Visualisation Test-Bed", in Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems V, ASP Conf. Series vol. 101, ed. G.H. Jacoby & J. Barnes, ASP, San Francisco, p.80-83, ISSN 1080-7926
- Gooch, R.E., 1995, "Astronomers and their Shady Algorithms", in IEEE Visualisation '95, ed. G.M. Nielson \& D. Silver, pub. IEEE, p.374-377 ISBN 0-8186-7187-4
- Gooch, R.E., 1996, "Grasping the Wispy Tendrils", in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, vol. 14, no. 1, p.106 ISSN 1323-3580