'sudden' Rstudio startup failure

Hello,
since yesterday, Rstudio will not startup anymore (used to work perfectly fine) on my linux mint laptop. This is what it shows:

Error Starting R

The R session failed to start.

RSTUDIO VERSION

RStudio 2023.06.1+524 "Mountain Hydrangea " (547dcf86, 2023-07-07) for Ubuntu Jammy

[No error available]

/usr/lib/rstudio/resources/app/bin/rsession: symbol lookup error:
/usr/lib/rstudio/resources/app/bin/rsession: undefined symbol: Rf_countContexts

OUTPUT

[No output emitted]

Log File
[No logs available]

I tried things like resetting the Rstudio desktop state, renaming .RData and .Rhistory (could not locate the .Rprofile)
before resetting the desktop state, I also had the

startup ERROR system error 84 (Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character) [str: θv, len: 3, from: UTF-8, to: ISO8859-1]; OCCURRED AT rstudio::core::Error rstudio::r::util::{anonymous}::iconvstrImpl(const string&, const string&, const string&, bool, std::string*)
(but also with [No error available] and no log file.

Any idea what can cause Rstudio to not start up anymore?

(my R.version:
platform x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
arch x86_64
os linux-gnu
system x86_64, linux-gnu
status
major 4
minor 5.0
year 2025
month 04
day 11
svn rev 88135
language R
version.string R version 4.5.0 (2025-04-11)
nickname How About a Twenty-Six

Rstudio version: 2023.06.1+524)

Does resetting RStudio's state help?

I see the same RStudio startup failure; same error message. Also happens when I disable (i.e., undefine)
R_PROFILE and R_ENVIRON, hence would basically start R --vanilla.
Problem only happens with R 4.5.0, not with R 4.4.3

Are you using the same operating system as @Wiebke ?

Resetting the desktop state removed the "startup error 84", but anything else, I copied above stayed.
So, no, it did not help.

I had the same issue after R 4.5 got installed on my system. For me, installing the latest version of RStudio (2024.12.1+563) fixed the problem. I'm on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and downloaded the deb for Ubuntu 24 from the website.

1 Like

Ah!
I only checked with synaptic and it told me that I had the latest version of Rstudio installed. I will check when back at work after the Easter break!
Thanks, I will keep you posted!

No, but a similar one: Linux on x86_64 (in my case Fedora 40 with its own latest version of rstudio).
I did not try to download myself from Posit's server, as usually the Fedora-provided versions are quite current (and well integrated with the other system libraries etc on Fedora).
It's good to "guess" that using your latest version would probably fix the problem.

I'm also on Linux (Mint 22.1). Prior to upgrading R to 4.5, I switched to a daily release of RStudio (2025.04.0) to confirm a bug fix. When I upgraded R, I did not run into any problems. So yes, updating RStudio sounds likely to be a solution.