I don't know if this is fixed in trunk, my apologies if it has, but the current stable binary on Ubuntu in the PPA throws an ugly error if you don't have dbus configured.
Someone else reported this here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1460797
To reproduce, convert any svg to pdf on the command line: inkscape --file logo.svg --export-pdf logo.pdf
Error: Failed to get connection ** (inkscape:10595): CRITICAL **: dbus_g_proxy_new_for_name: assertion 'connection != NULL' failed ** (inkscape:10595): CRITICAL **: dbus_g_proxy_call: assertion 'DBUS_IS_G_PROXY (proxy)' failed ** (inkscape:10595): CRITICAL **: dbus_g_connection_register_g_object: assertion 'connection != NULL' failed
I don't know if this is a missing packaging dependency (requiring dbus) or a configure-time error, but I run Inkscape without X and so don't normally have dbus available.
Full steps to reproduce in vagrant: vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64 vagrant ssh sudo apt-get install python-software-properties sudo add-apt-repository ppa:inkscape.dev/stable sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install inkscape wget https://chartio.com/static/app/images/logo.svg inkscape --file logo.svg --export-pdf logo.pdf
Thanks -Peter