IDL has the following system requirements:

  • Operating systems:
    • Windows 10 and 11 (Intel/AMD 64-bit)

    • macOS 12 and 13 (Intel 64-bit (x86_64) and M-series (arm64))

    • Linux (Intel/AMD 64-bit, kernel 4.18.0 or higher and glibc 2.28 or higher)
  • Disk space: Approximately 4 GB for installation
  • Memory (RAM): Minimum of 8 GB*
  • Number of processing cores: Minimum of 2, recommended 4 or more

An X-Windows manager is required for macOS. IDL was tested using XQuartz 2.8.5 on an M1 chipset.

* Most image display and processing capabilities in IDL have been designed to work with minimal amounts of system RAM. Having a lot of RAM can help to avoid occasional memory allocation problems, especially with large datasets. Tests have shown that 8 GB of RAM is adequate for most tasks run using the latest versions of IDL. However, if you anticipate working with very large datasets, or if you are building custom applications with ENVI+IDL code, then you may consider adding more RAM to your system.