[Rd] R on maemo

[Simon Urbanek]

On Oct 27, 2009, at 12:13 , Juha Vierinen wrote:

> Has anyone tried to compile R on the Nokia maemo platform? I've been  
> thinking about buying the n900 phone when it comes out, but I guess  
> the main selling point would be a possibility to run R on it. I've  
> read some rumors that it is based on debian, and that it can run X11  
> apps. In theory, you wouldn't even need to write any GUI. You should  
> be able to run R in command line mode, with plots appearing as X11  
> windows.
>

I didn't actually do it but given that the hardware is almost  
identical to the iPhone I'd say the chances are pretty good that it  
should work (simply cross-compile using ARM target bi-arch R for host  
and target as discussed for iPhone and Android). As you pointed out  
the UI situation is even easier although the devil may be in the  
details. Still, I don't think R is a useful application on a mobile  
device -- IMHO  the future is in a thin mobile client accessing the  
cloud (which runs R among other things) since there is no point in  
trying to use the low-power CPUs for computing.

Cheers,
Simon