Inkscape

Inkscape won't open Mac OS X 10.9.5

Asked by utsekaj

I have downloaded Inkscape and reinstalled XQuartz, but Inkscape still won't launch.
I don't even get a dialogue to point to the XQuartz binary.

If I open Inkscape, the icon bounces briefly on the dock and then disappears without any error message.

If I try to run Inkscape via `Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/bin/inkscape -g` I get the following

```
W: AppleCollationOrder setting not found, using AppleLocale.
Setting LANGSTR from AppleLocale: en
Overriding empty LANG from /usr/share/locale/locale.alias
Setting Language: en_US.UTF-8

(inkscape-bin:1419): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:
```

Any ideas about where the problem may be or where to look?

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Revision history for this message
Hachmann (marenhachmann) said : 		#1

Could one of our Mac experts please help utsekaj? This is far from my area of expertise...

In the mean time, I have only one idea for you, utsekaj. You could test with the pre-release version of Inkscape, which you can find here:
https://inkscape.org/en/download/
I have no idea if this would indeed help you, but if you are willing to experiment, it may be worth a try.

Regards,
 Maren

Revision history for this message
utsekaj (jacob-sturdy) said : 		#2

I figured out I am able to launch inkscape from xterm, if I've already launched xquartz by using the following command in xterm

```
open /Applications/Inkscape.app
````
as suggested by the addendum to this post <http://grammarofdev.blogspot.no/2013/10/how-to-run-inkscape-in-os-x-109.html>
I don't know if this means the issue is with how XQuartz is installed, or if it is an issue in the Inkscape startup script.

I have tried the prerelease version of Inkscape, and on the first attempt to open I got a popup about how windows may be hidden.
After that nothing further happened, and when attempting to launch it again still nothing happened.

Revision history for this message
su_v (suv-lp) said : 		#3

On 2014-12-30 20:51 (+0100), utsekaj wrote:
> I figured out I am able to launch inkscape from xterm, if I've already
> launched xquartz by using the following command in xterm
>
> ```
> open /Applications/Inkscape.app
> ````

To me this would suggest that you have a somehow misconfigured
X11/XQuartz (the default $DISPLAY variable gets overridden in one of the
dot files of your account, or even system-wide).

What is the output of this command:

 echo $DISPLAY

in a new Terminal window (not xterm, the Terminal.app which is part of
the main OS), and in the xterm opened from within XQuartz? If the output
of the two commands differs, autolaunching XQuartz on demand by
applications which need it won't work, and the same applications can't
connect to a running X server (XQuartz) because the server doesn't use
the same $DISPLAY as is known to the applications launched regularly.

Did you test with a new or different user account on your system?

Revision history for this message
utsekaj (jacob-sturdy) said : 		#4

I just tested with a different user and Inkscape launched fine.

`echo $DISPLAY` in Terminal.app returns nothing, when in xterm the result is ':0', I did a quick search through my ~/ folder, but none of the config files there seem to change $DISPLAY, which is apparently not set. (Any ideas why not, or what might be clearing it?).

Revision history for this message
utsekaj (jacob-sturdy) said : 		#5

I found this discussion over at apple.com <https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4157422?start=15&tstart=0>, which indicated the User Agent allowing programs to start X11 wasn't running.

The following command seems to have fixed the issue
```
launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/org.macosforge.xquartz.startx.plist
```

I'm not sure how it was disable to begin with.
The grep's suggested to find config files clobbering the $DISPLAY variable didn't find anything.

Thanks for the help.