set cairo as default bitmaptype in etc/Rprofile.site

[stdweird]

as EB has cairo as a build dep, it might make sense to set cairo as a site default in EBROOT/lib64/R/etc/Rprofile.site by creating that file and adding options(bitmapType = 'cairo') to it

if that is not set, and although it is claimed that cairo is dfault, it seems to try to use X11/Xlib by default; which might not work at all (on typical hpc node env) and is apparently more crappy then cairo

[boegel]

Makes sense to me, although I didn't look into the specifics myself.

@fizwit Do you have any experience with this?

[branfosj]

At my site we have documented:

---

If you see a message of 'unable to open connection to X11 display' when generating plots in RStudio then you can do one of the following:

• add options(bitmapType='cairo') before plotting.
• change the plot command to include type="cairo".
• add the text: options(bitmapType='cairo') to the file ~/.Rprofile (creating it, if required). This will ensure that the setting persists across each time you load RStudio on BEAR Portal.

---

We do also have people using R via X11 forwarding, but we've been moving those to the better experience of using RStudio Server. So, I am happy with the suggested change.

[stdweird]

@boegel so looks like --with-cairo is passed to ./configure