Hi Daniel, I see in a previous incident with tech support that you mentioned that ENVI was coming up very slowly. Is it now not coming up at all? If you go to the IDL Workbench console (which should start up before ENVI tries to start up), do you see any messages listed? Because this is happening only when logged on as a regular user (presumably without administrator privileges), I wonder if it has to do with some directory permission? But usually in that case, ENVI will bring up an error message telling you which directory it needs to access that it cannot access. In this case, with no messages, it is hard to say what might be happening. If you are on Windows, you could bring up the Task Manager, and check the processes to see if the ENVI process is taking up CPU resources. If it is, then it means that ENVI is working away at something, and not just dead. That might be useful to know. Regards, Peg Exelis VIS

When I start idlde I get no errors it just starts. When I start envi I see: IDL Version 8.4... Installation number : Licensed for use: %Restored file:ENVI % Loaded DLM:PNG %Loaded DLM: HPGRAPHICS %Loaded DLM: XML And I see the idl loading screen and then nothing. No errors it just sits there showing the "Get the information you Need from Imagery" screen and never budges. This is a Linux instance. I have tried it from both a windows system running XMING and a Linux system. Same result. It does feel like a permissions problem but with no errors I cant find the file. Is there a way to force ENVI to give out more debug information?

There are a couple of things to try: 1. try launching ENVI with the 'su' command to give permission, if possible 2. remove the .idl directory from the users home directory. This contains many configurations and perhaps some files were corrupted. When ENVI or IDL is launched, the directories will be recreated for that user as if it was a fresh install.

ok I tried su -c envi and I tried su - -c envi and it just hangs. I tried deleting the .idl directory and still hangs. It seems it only works as root from the system console.. when i CTR-C i get an envi prompt but no gui. is there a way of starting the gui from the envi prompt?

Update: I got to thinking and tried to start it up as a user from the system console and it started. I did get one error however: Warning: Cannot convert string "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-naormal-*-*-120-75-75-p-*-iso8859-1" So why is it only working from a full desktop login, and only on the system console, and not from a standard gnome -terminal? and how do i fix the one error I got?

If by "system console" you mean a local display physically connected to the machine running ENVI and "standard gnome -terminal" meaning your are attempting to launch ENVI over a remote display and connecting using ssh, perhaps the following help article can help: http://www.exelisvis.com/Support/Help... Regarding the cannot convert string error, I think that's just an innocuous warning because you don't have that particular font installed on the system. In which case, a different replacement system font is used by ENVI.

I appreciate the help so far, but we already do all the suggestions on the remote ssh session. I think what is not being communicated is that we had absolutely none of these problems before we updated the license file. Why did the license file cause the envi to no longer work over ssh? Do we have a problem with the license? I should also mention that idlde graphic mode works just fine over the ssh remote session. It is only the envi that now wont even display.

I have heard no reply to my last post. Any ideas why the license update caused envi to not display over ssh but idlde works fine?

There is nothing about updating the license that should change the behavior of your OS that I am aware of. If you replace the new license with the old, does ENVI launch? I would not expect the behavior to change.