Running R on the iPad

I'm a hardcore Mac user, so it's annoying to me that we don't yet support Revolution R Enterprise on MacOS X. Believe me, I've argued the point. But MacOS is still a relatively uncommon platform in business, and there's just not the demand yet from customers to justify porting the Revolution R extensions to MacOS X. (Open-source Revolution R Community is available for MacOS X, but doesn't include big data or the IDE or other extras.) But Jan de Leeuw points out there's another option:

If you want your Mac to run Revolution R Enterprise, or some of the CUDA/GPU packages that run best under Linux, then this can of course be done by running the appropriate OS in an emulator such as Parallels Desktop.

Better yet, you can make it run on the iPad too, using this technique:

Parallels now also has Parallels Mobile for the iPad, which is basically a screen sharing app. You have a Parellels running on a remote desktop that you login to from the iPad, and then you start (for example) Revolution R from your iPad, and you can enter commands directly into the R interpreter from the iPad keyboard.

Before the end of the year you'll also be able to print remotely.

It's still clunky, but it can be done. And it can be done over 3G as well.

OK, that's not quite running R on the iPad -- it's more like using the iPad as a remote terminal -- but still very cool. If you want to run R natively on the iPad, things aren't quite so simple: the rules of Apple's App Store forbid implementing language interpreters like R, so the chances of an R app being approved seem slim. So you're stuck with jailbreaking iOS to install non-approved apps (a practice the US courts recently ruled legal over Apple's objections). There are detailed instructions for running R on an iPhone running iOS4 here, and there have been reports of it working with some limitations: the base and recommended packages appear to work fine, but CRAN packages that rely on a Fortran compiler are proving problematic to build. In any case iOS4 won't be available for the iPad until November, and even then there's no guarantee it will be jailbroken. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Computational Mathematics: R on the iPhone

Comments

[Ajay Ohri]

David,

Can we use Revolution Enterprise and the big data package o Ubuntu yet

Regards

Ajay

Ps. I use VM player for multiple OS-though not sure you can use VM player on Mac etc

[Ajay Ohri]

I see you do have support for the platforms "
Wide Platform Support: Available for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.:

I am not sure but what would be effort required in porting R Enterprise from Red Hat Linux to Ubuntu/Debian

[Adam Hyland]

The recent changes to Apple's developer guidelines could permit R, but with a silly restriction on downloaded code

http://daringfireball.net/2010/09/app_store_guidelines

Maybe we could write packages as free "in app purchases" and have core R on the ipad/iphone. As for the jailbroken iOs devices, at least the new ipod touches and iphones have a boot rom vulnerability which will allow jailbreaking a whole class of devices without Apple's software updates causing a problem.

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

If the R community *truly* wants to advance into the tablet / cloud age, we'll *stop* futzing around with jailbreaking, trying to shoehorn a 20-year-old mix of (gcc) C, C++ and FORTRAN onto low-frequency ARM processors, remote desktops / virtualizers and all that other reverse engineering horseshit! Android clients are best programmed in the Android dialect of Java, iPhone/iPad clients are best programmed in Objective C, and browsers the world over are best programmed in HTML5/CSS/Javascript.

For servers, there's Rapache and all the other server, cloud and cluster technology we can and will build. You can run an R back end underneath Rails (Ruby) or Django (Python) or Catalyst (Perl) or any of the dozens of Java web frameworks. I'm sure with a little glue logic you can do it for .NET or PHP. Let's have more *forward* engineering, the likes of what Revolution Analytics is doing. Otherwise, R will end up firmly locked into the desktop age.

[Tran Manh Tuong]

i can not run R on the new ipad, althought i do everything:
+ Install R-packages from cydia
+ in stall SSH
but when i run R (on SSH) i recieve the note: "Kill 9"
help me!!
my ipad was jeakbreaken.
thank very much.