[Rd] png error

[Simon Urbanek]

One thing that puzzles me is that the error says DISPLAY is '' so it looks like some code wipes the DISPLAY variable - no idea where that happens.

That said, have you tried setting:

options(bitmapType="cairo")

That should use cairo even if the default auto-detection decided to use X11.

Cheers,
Simon



> On 10/09/2026, at 07:59, Ivan Krylov <krylov.r00t using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:51:02 +0000
> Terry Therneau via R-devel <r-devel using r-project.org> wrote:
> 
>>  Additional capabilities:     PNG, JPEG, TIFF, NLS, cairo, ICU
> 
> This says that you have working "cairo", but R also needs "pangocairo"
> for png(type="cairo") to work; the configure script doesn't mention the
> latter in the final output. Does 'pkg-config --path pangocairo' produce
> any output? R remembers the result of this configure-time test and uses
> .Call(grDevices:::C_cairoProps, 2L) to remind itself when it starts up.
> If there's no output from pkg-config or cairoProps returns FALSE, make
> sure you have libpango1.0-dev installed.
> 
> As for why doesn't the X11 device seem to work with Xvfb... there's
> little error checking in tools:::start_virtual_X11_fb, so even if Xvfb
> doesn't run at all, R still sets the DISPLAY environment variable and
> remembers a "PID". Hence the question whether there is a socket in
> /tmp/.X11-unix with the same number as in the DISPLAY, or whether
> 'xvfb-run R CMD check *_tar.gz' works.
> 
> -- 
> Best regards,
> Ivan
> 
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