HOWTO: IDL Installation

[Bosonator]

I recently purchased the IDL Student Edition data analysis software for my graduate physics studies. The software is good for scientific image manipulation and analysis, and is commonly used by astronomers and medical physicists, among others.

The software is officially supported only for RedHat Linux, but I was able to get it to run on Ubuntu Edgy using the following procedure:

1. Install the Corn shell.
The default terminal shell in Ubuntu is called "Bash" (Bourne Again Shell). The installation script for IDL, however, is written for "Csh" (the Corn Shell). Install this using apt-get.

sudo apt-get install csh

2. Mount the installation media.
Just to be on the safe side, I unmounted the disk first, because Ubuntu typically automounts cdrom media, and you want to make sure the permissions are right.

sudo umount /media/cdrom0/ 
sudo mount -o ro -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom0

(your devices and mount points might differ from mine. Name them accordingly)

3. Once the disk is mounted, start csh from a terminal using sudo.

sudo csh

4. You will now be running the installation script. On my machine, this command looks like this:

/media/cdrom0/xinstall.sh

5. The installation window pops up, and you have to answer a bunch of questions. When it asks you if you want it to create the symbolic links, tell it "yes".

6. You have IDL installed! Start it by issuing "idlde" from the command line.