The following should be added to ~/.bashrc and (?) ~/.bash_profile (replacing the data storage path, the include path, and the root path as appropriate).
function spedas {
module load idl
export ROOT_DATA_DIR="/export/scratch/users/mceachern/rbsp"
idl -e "PREF_SET, 'IDL_DLM_PATH', '<IDL_DEFAULT>'+PATH_SEP(/SEARCH_PATH)+'~/Desktop/rbsp/incl', /COMMIT"
ROOTDIR=~/Desktop/rbsp/packages/
idl $* -IDL_PATH "+$ROOTDIR:<IDL_DEFAULT>"
}
export -f spedas
Creating a symbolic link to the EFW examples is also convenient. In rbsp/, type ln -s packages/spdsw_r20105_2016-02-22/idl/general/missions/rbsp/efw/examples/ examples. IDL does seem to respect symbolic links.
Bleeding-edge SPEDAS software comes from http://themis.ssl.berkeley.edu/socware/bleeding_edge/.
Geopack library is located at http://ampere.jhuapl.edu/code/idl_geopack.html. Note that version 9.3 has dependencies that the physics department machines can't satisfy, but 7.6 seems to work.
Icy, the IDL SPICE toolkit, comes from http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit_IDL.html.
Requirements include NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib. The versions on department machines may be too old; try pip install --user --upgrade scipy and so on if libraries seem to be missing. This does not require root access, since it performs the upgrade only for the current user.