[Internal] Mavericks: Application has requested access to X11. Would you like to install X11 now?

This Help Article is a collection of new issues that seem to appear when installing or running ENVI/IDL in the new Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

Installing ENVI/IDL for the first time in a fresh Mavericks

If a computer never had ENVI/IDL installed before, and it has Mavericks installed, for example in new laptops (after October 24th 2013). Then you will see the following happening:

1- Trying to install ENVI or IDL will give you the error:

cat: .0

The reason for this error is that a fresh Mavericks (one that doesn't come from a previous installed version of the OS, i.e. and upgrade to Mavericks, or a new computer) the system doesn't have X11/XQuartz installed yet.

Solution

Therefore, you will need to install XQuartz. Apple points to the following like to get XQuartz:

http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/

2- Once XQuartz is installed, you can start the ENVI/IDL installation.

3- When the installation finished, try starting IDL. You will see the following error message:

To open "idlde.darwin.x86_64", you need a Java SE 6 runtime.

Would you like to install one now?

4- After installing Java 6, then IDL works.

Installing ENVI/IDL after upgrading your 10.8 system to Mavericks

In this case, it is possible that Java 6 and XQuartz are already in the system, therefore the only issue that appears is the following: Mavericks doesn't know that XQuartz is already installed and that it should launch when ENVI or IDL needs it.

The problem appears when trying to run ENVI/IDL, a window from the operating system appears asking the following question:

Application has requested access to X11. 

Would you like to install X11 now?

Solution

1- Uninstall XQuartz

2- Re-install XQuartz from http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/

Then, ENVI/IDL will work fine.