Is there a setting or permission I am supposed to set for the icons to show up? I am in osx. no UI. there is the building ui cache message that runs but when it is done there are no icon images. plus checking a node gives the following errors.

any ideas?

I'm pretty sure that the reason is that you don't have X11 installed. I hade similar errors which was resovled by installing X11 (should be on your OS X DVD).