Parallel Workers Running MS Windows via Wine

Henrik Bengtsson

Introduction

This vignette shows how to set up parallel workers running on MS Windows via Wine (https://www.winehq.org/) on Linux and macOS.

Install R for MS Windows 10

To install R for MS Windows in Wine, first configure Wine to use Windows 10;

$ winecfg

In the GUI, set ‘Windows version’ to ‘Windows 10’. Then, install R for Windows in Wine, by:

$ wget https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/R-4.4.2-win.exe
$ wine R-4.4.2-win.exe /SILENT

Finally, verify that R is available in Wine;

$ wine "C:/Program Files/R/R-4.4.2/bin/x64/Rscript.exe" --version
...
Rscript (R) version 4.4.2 (2024-10-31)

Examples

Example: Parallel workers running MS Windows via Wine

This example shows how to launch one worker running in Wine for Linux on the local machine.

cl <- makeClusterPSOCK(
  1L,
  rscript = c(
    ## Silence Wine warnings
    "WINEDEBUG=fixme-all",
    ## Don't pass LC_* and R_LIBS* environments from host to Wine
    sprintf("%s=", grep("^(LC_|R_LIBS)", names(Sys.getenv()), value = TRUE)),
    "wine",
    "C:/Program Files/R/R-4.4.2/bin/x64/Rscript.exe"
  )
)
print(cl)
#> Socket cluster with 1 nodes where 1 node is on host 'localhost'
#> (R version 4.4.2 (2024-10-31 ucrt), platform x86_64-w64-mingw32)