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IDL Advice

IDL is a long-running data analysis tool, originally created for the Astronomy field, but now used for a number of scientific applications. We maintain a number of IDL licenses on our primary license server.

When running IDL on our Linux machines, you may find that it does not start, issuing some sort of error about creating the "Trusted storage", or maybe that the "Trusted storage is corrupted". This error stems from how IDL maintains licenses on Unix machines. We have recently made a change that requires you to create the folder for the trusted storage, before running IDL:

> mkdir /var/tmp/idl

> chmod 777 /var/tmp/idl

Once you do this, IDL should start normally. If you still get an error about the storage being "corrupted", look in the above directory for files belonging to other users and simply delete them:

> rm /var/tmp/idl/am*

That should allow IDL to work for you. Deleting the above files will not impact running IDL sessions.

If this not fixes the issue, in some rare cases, we had to do a additional step as stated in here:

https://www.nv5geospatialsoftware.com/Support/Maintenance-Detail/ArtMID/13350/ArticleID/24045/How-to-resolve-error-%22CLLFloatingLicenseInitialize-failed-to-start-the-license-thread

If this does not fix the issue, in some rare cases, we had to do an additional step:

If available, delete the fne.xxx file in the /tmp directory and try to start the program again.

[pls@astro, 15-dec-2023]