# Parallel Workers Running MS Windows via Wine

# Introduction

This vignette shows how to set up parallel workers running R for MS Windows via Wine (https://www.winehq.org/) on Linux and macOS. This can be useful when we need to run R code or call R packages that work only on MS Windows.

The below instructions assumes that you already have Wine installed.

## 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-4.5.1-win.exe
    $ wine R-4.5.1-win.exe /SILENT

Finally, verify that R is available in Wine;

    $ wine "C:/Program Files/R/R-4.5.1/bin/x64/Rscript.exe" --version
    ...
    Rscript (R) version 4.5.1 (2025-06-13)

# 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-4.5.1/bin/x64/Rscript.exe"
      )
    )
    print(cl)
    #> Socket cluster with 1 node on host 'localhost'
    #> (R version 4.5.1 (2025-06-13 ucrt), platform x86_64-w64-mingw32)