R Cairo installation without apt-get, sudo

Question

I am working on a headless ubuntu machine with most of the cairo requirements preinstalled, but I am stumbling on getting R to use Cairo. Does anyone know what flags or additional packages I need to set/install in order to have install.packages build Cairo correctly with the existing installs of its dependencies? The tricks: I cannot use sudo commands or apt-get, and additional software must involve <50Mb of memory. Is this possible? It looks like most everything I need is present, if I can wire it into R.

> library('Cairo')
Error in library("Cairo") : there is no package called ‘Cairo’
> install.packages('Cairo')
...
* installing *source* package ‘Cairo’ ...
...
checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config
configure: CAIRO_CFLAGS=/usr/lib:/usr/bin:/usr/include
checking if R was compiled with the RConn patch... no
checking cairo.h usability... no
checking cairo.h presence... no
checking for cairo.h... no
configure: error: Cannot find cairo.h! Please install cairo (http://www.cairographics.org/) and/or set CAIRO_CFLAGS/LIBS correspondingly.
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘Cairo’
* removing ‘/app/vendor/R/lib64/R/library/Cairo’

This means I need to install the libcairo2-dev package, but doing so via configure/make runs into a pixman error despite pixman being present on my system:

package pixman-1 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `pixman-1.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'pixman-1' found
No package 'pixman-1' found
checking whether cairo's image surface backend feature could be enabled
no (requires pixman-1 >= 0.22.0 http://cairographics.org/releases/)error: mandatory image surface backend feature could not be enabled

What is installed:

$ dpkg -l | grep 'cairo\|png\|fontc\|pix'
ii  fontconfig     2.8.0-2ubuntu1 generic font configuration library - support
ii  fontconfig-con 2.8.0-2ubuntu1 generic font configuration library - configu
ii  libcairo2      1.8.10-2ubuntu The Cairo 2D vector graphics library
ii  libfontconfig1 2.8.0-2ubuntu1 generic font configuration library - runtime
ii  libpixman-1-0  0.16.4-1ubuntu pixel-manipulation library for X and cairo
ii  libpng12-0     1.2.42-1ubuntu PNG library - runtime
ii  libpng12-dev   1.2.42-1ubuntu PNG library - development

My session info:

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.1 (2012-06-22)
Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
 [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
 [7] LC_PAPER=C                 LC_NAME=C                 
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base   

R does not see cairo:

> capabilities()
    jpeg      png     tiff    tcltk      X11     aqua http/ftp  sockets 
   FALSE    FALSE    FALSE    FALSE    FALSE    FALSE     TRUE     TRUE 
  libxml     fifo   cledit    iconv      NLS  profmem    cairo 
    TRUE     TRUE     TRUE     TRUE     TRUE    FALSE    FALSE 

Coumarin

You probably need the development package libpixman-1-dev as well. – Trawler

If you just need cairo.h, why are you building cairo yourself instead of just installing libcairo2-dev? – Buchmanism

As the second block of text indicates, I am trying to install that package, but hitting a dependency error. The commenter above was correct in pixman needing development headers as well. – Coumarin

@bwarren did you manage to fix this issue I have the same problem using an AWS R instance. – Anaglyph

Answer 1

you need the cario dev files

apt-get install libcairo2-dev

I also needed to install the following

apt-get install libxt-dev

For a solution which does not use apt (as the OP requested), please see the following answer

Butcherbird

Requires apt-get and sudo, which the title notes are unavailable. The more definitive answer on this process is https://mcmap.net/q/744181/-heroku-rpy-rhome-discovery/… – Coumarin

I still get this problem in 2023 and your suggestion solve my problem. Thanks – Luau

Answer 2

Looks like you need cario-devel. See below for instructions for installation. At least doing so resolved my missing "cairo.h" issue. Hope this helps.

http://cairographics.org/download/

Antependium

Answer 3

Follow these steps

sudo apt-get install libcairo2-dev

Once installed, you can execute following commands in R-Studio

install.packages('Cairo')
library(Cairo)

Gunnel

This question (which is pretty old now) says without sudo or apt-get – Bolen