From hin-tak.leung at cimr.cam.ac.uk  Thu Oct 13 19:02:19 2005
From: hin-tak.leung at cimr.cam.ac.uk (Hin-Tak Leung)
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 18:02:19 +0100
Subject: [Rd] R, Wine, and multi-threadedness.
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Message-ID: <434E931B.1030509@cimr.cam.ac.uk>

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Marc Schwartz (via MN) wrote:
<snipped>
>>Sorry for jumping in here and no disrespect intended to anyone, but I am
>>confused relative to the desire and benefits of running R under Wine on
>>Linux simply for the sake of using the RGui.exe menus, when there are
>>other substantive tradeoffs relative to running R natively on Linux, as
>>Prof. Ripley has noted.
> 
> 
> One reason for doing so is to be able to prepare for teaching in a Windows 
> environment: I believe this is why it is mentioned in the FAQ.  (I 
> personally test on the machine to be used just to be sure things work.)

I agree; and being able to discuss it with another user who may be
on windows. Having alternatives and choices is good.

Actually my earlier failed incentive was to run the Sciview-R GUI. It
most certainly looks very useful and functional from the screenshots,
and I dare say it is probably one of the best available - it is hard
to imagine one "better" - the unix fanatics around me told me about
ESS and I do have it installed and configured, but it isn't
anywhere close to the Sciview-R GUI - sadly it is heavily .NET based
and won't run under wine, which only recently moved to emulate 2k
as default and have very little support for xp, 2k3 and the
more security-conscious part of the NT families. I did install
sciview-R successfully, but as soon as I see the manifest files,
I realise it won't run under wine, not a hope.

Would be interesting to see if they are can port that to GTK#/mono
on linux.

>>The one "advantage" that I had seen some time ago, was the possibility
>>of being able to generate metafile graphics for inclusion with MS Office
>>apps by using the native Windows libs (in a dual-boot scenario as I
>>recall). However other substantively better options for generating high
>>quality graphics have been proposed and discussed here frequently.
> 
> 
> I am not 100% convinced that they are `substantively better' in all 
> environments, and I still do that sometimes.

I agree on principle - until the linux port can do *exactly* the
same thing better and more, "substantively better" is a
rather subjective description and is just for the fanatics. If
it is missing just one feature, like WMF export - and since microsoft
is not going bankrupt any time soon, MS office integration is
fairly important to *some* people - one cannot say it is
'substantially better', because there is always one user who would
judge that one missing feature, over and above any other advantage.

Some software on linux uses libwmf for wmf import/export (I believe
it is gimp). Maybe R can do the same.

Hin-Tak Leung.



[Rd] R, Wine, and multi-threadedness.
Hin-Tak Leung