Installing IDL v7.1 on Kubuntu 16.04 (on MacBook pro)

The IDL installation went smooth as usual, but when I tried to run IDL, there was an error:

error while loading shared libraries: libXp.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory 

In the IDL help pages ( IDL fails to install on Linux: What to do, scroll down to the Ubuntu section) there is a comment on that that turned only half useful. Two libraries I got installed with no problem:

sudo apt-get install libxmu-dev
sudo apt-get install libxmu6

but the other three were not found in repositories. Instead of manual installation (two of them are available from http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/, but the last one is a bit mysterious. Google finds it only in three pages related to IDL, one of them being the previously mentioned page from the IDL docs). Instead, I got if from Git. As I have just installed Kubuntu there was still some important packages missing, so some of the following steps may be redundant for you.

sudo apt-get install autoconf autogen intltool
sudo apt-get install git
sudo apt-get install xutils-dev libtool libx11-dev 
                          x11proto-xext-dev x11proto-print-dev
git clone https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libXp/

Then cd to libXp directory and execute

sudo ./autogen.sh

In my case if was complaining about the line 18214 related to XPRINT. I commented out that line from the script and executed it again. After that everything is straight forward:

sudo ./configure
sudo make install

And finally I add the path to the library to .bashrc (all in one line):

echo 'export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc

After that IDL worked normally. 

Check the endianness of your Linux machine

There is a very simple way to check the endianness of your Linux machine. Just type:

printf '\1' | od -dAn

If the answer is 1, then your machine is little endian. If 256, it is big endian.

Loosless ps-to-pdf conversion in Linux

The easiest way to do convert your eps/ps figures to pdf in Linux (without a quality loss) is to use epstopdf script. It calls ghostview with several compression options as default and it's not possible to change that just from the command line. The quick solution is to change epstopdf itself. It is usually located in /usr/bin/ directory. Line

$GSOPTS = "-dUseFlateCompression=false " unless $::opt_compress;

should be changed to

$GSOPTS = "-dUseFlateCompression=false -dAutoFilterColorImages=false -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode " unless $::opt_compress;

After the change is made, you can convert your eps to pdf with

epstopdf --nocompress file.eps