Comment 3 for bug 498710

> I didn't see X11 launch
Does this mean if X11 isn't already running it does _not_ get launched when staring Inkscape? Expected behaviour is that Inkscape triggers the start of X11 automatically (via launchd) on a default system configuration.

>> X11.app: Could not connect to server (DISPLAY is not set). Starting X server.
Something seems strange with your X11 configuration. AFAIK the environment variable $DISPLAY should be automatically set by the mechanism that launches X11 when an application requests it. Did you by chance either upgrade/migrate from Tiger (where you used special X11 configuration files) or install any of the Xquartz Beta versions from <http://xquartz.macosforge.org>?

With X11 running, could you please open a terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and enter
 echo $DISPLAY
and paste the result back here.

You might also consider asking on the X11-users mailing list (http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/x11-users).

> Thank you for the code, but it means almost nothing to me.
It was added as further reference for bug triage.

possibly related to
bug #167857 “assertion hit when running inkscape without DISPLAY set”:

other reports with $DISPLAY issues on OS X Leopard
Bug #433281“Unable to Open Inkscape-0.47pre2-2 from Finder in Snow Leopard, but Able to Open from Terminal”:
Bug #398186 “DISPLAY=:0.0 prevents launch-on-demand of X11 on OS X Leopard”: