Changing the browser used for the IDL help on Linux

On Linux/Solaris systems, the IDL 8 on-line help will by default launch in your default web browser. However, there are some scenarios where you may want the IDL help to launch in a browser that is not your default browser. For example, if your default web browser is Google Chrome, you may find that the IDL 8.1 on-line help does not work very well with this browser. There are a couple solutions to this problem:

1) Change your default browser to Firefox.

2) Direct IDL to open the on-line help with Firefox by setting the IDL_HELP_BROWSER environment variable. If you are using a bash shell you can do this by adding the following line to your ~/.bashrc file:

export IDL_HELP_BROWSER=firefox

If you are using a csh shell you can add the following line to your ~/.cshrc file:

setenv IDL_HELP_BROWSER firefox

The next time the enviroment is set, the IDL online help should launch in Firefox. The environment will be set if you start a new terminal window or source the resource file (for example you could type "source ~/.bashrc" into the terminal").