INTERNAL/REVIEW: Solaris 10 security update for X11 causes IDL to crash (may also affect Solaris 8 and 9)
Help Article Update 2
Anonym
[Needs to be reviewed for Compliance and IP issues (i.e. binary file included)]
On June 4, 2007 Sun released patch 119059-27/x11 6.6.2 for Solaris 10 systems, which corrects multiple problems in Solaris 10. Among the updates is a security enhancment to the X11 system that causes IDL 6.4 to crash when performing some graphics operations.
If you have installed patch 119059-27/x11 6.6.2 (or even a later patch like 127111-11) on your Solaris system, you will need to install the IDL 6.4.1 update in order for IDL 6.4 to work correctly. This update replaces the libidl.so.6 files in IDL's bin/bin.solaris2.sparc and bin/bin.solaris2.sparc64 directories with versions of the library modified to operate with Sun's patch.
(For Solaris 8 and Solaris 9, the Solaris patch that produces this behavior on these other versions of the OS will have a different Solaris patch identifier. The IDL 6.4.1 patch seems to correct the IDL problem on these other versions of Solaris as well.)
Discussion:
To install the update:
1) Download the idl641_solaris_x11.tar.gz file here and place it in your IDL 6.4 installation directory. (If you installed IDL in the default location, the installation directory is '/usr/local/itt/idl64'.)
2) Ensure that IDL is not running.
3) Change current directory to the 'idl64' directory and, using a 'root' login or "sudo", execute the following commands at the shell prompt:
$ gunzip idl641_solaris_x11.tar.gz
$ tar -xvf idl641_solaris_x11.tar
The second tar command will overwrite the 'libidl.so.6' files in your IDL 6.4 installation with updated versions.
After you have installed the IDL 6.4.1 update, run the following tests at the IDL command prompt to confirm that it installed properly:
IDL> print, !VERSION.RELEASE
IDL> print, !VERSION.BUILD_DATE
These commands should output "6.4.1" and "June 12 2007", respectively.
Notes:
- This problem has been corrected in IDL 7.0 and newer versions of IDL.
- The equivalent Solaris 9 patch that may cause this issue is "112785-62".