I have tried the solution using Intel MKL, and for me the speedup was negligible. This was for a script that does Markov-chain Monte Carlo studies of traits related to mating on a moose population. The libraries plyr, MuMIn, gdata, parallel and MCMCglmm were used. Does anyone have experience with significant speedupt using MKL? Perhaps in applications using lots of linear algebra? --AsmundEr (talk) 08:22, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

I think the section on optimized builds should be dropped from the wiki, or moved to a less proninent location. openblas commonly causes problems with R HPC packages for parallel computations, and the r-mkl AUR package has been orphaned due to licencing issues. In short getting an optimized blas working with R is a fairly advanced and error-prone process, and I don't think it should be the second thing people see when they look up R on the Archlinux wiki. Thoughts? Izahn (talk) 14:55, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Since there was no objection here I've moved the "Optimized package" section to the end. Izahn

Also there seems to be some evidence that MKL does not severely outperform OpenBLAS: Benchmarking Single- and Multi-Core BLAS --Matmo (talk) 20:13, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Now available in the AUR: revolution-r-open. Unikum (talk) 21:41, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

When creating packages you need to run the command R CMD check 'package-name' to check for errors. Using the arch R install, the process fails with a message

LaTeX errors when creating PDF version. This typically indicates Rd problems. LaTeX errors found: ! LaTeX Error: File `Rd.sty' not found.

The problem seems to be that the arch R installation puts Rd.sty in

/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/Rd.sty

whereas R CMD check is looking for it in

/usr/share/R/texmf/tex/latex/Rd.sty

It may be possible to set a switch to tell R where it is, but I just created a /usr/share/R/texmf and copied it over, including

/usr/share/R/texmf/bibtex /usr/share/R/texmf/bibtex/bib /usr/share/R/texmf/bibtex/bib/RJournal.bib /usr/share/R/texmf/bibtex/bib/Rnews.bib /usr/share/R/texmf/bibtex/bst /usr/share/R/texmf/bibtex/bst/jss.bst /usr/share/R/texmf/tex /usr/share/R/texmf/tex/latex /usr/share/R/texmf/tex/latex/omscmtt.fd /usr/share/R/texmf/tex/latex/omsaett.fd /usr/share/R/texmf/tex/latex/Rd.sty /usr/share/R/texmf/tex/latex/jss.cls /usr/share/R/texmf/tex/latex/omsaer.fd /usr/share/R/texmf/tex/latex/ts1aett.fd /usr/share/R/texmf/tex/latex/ts1aer.fd /usr/share/R/texmf/tex/latex/Sweave.sty

just to cover all bets with respect to creating vignettes, etc.

—This unsigned comment is by Dvrbts (talk) 01:04, 1 January 2016 (UTC). Please sign your posts with ~~~~!

Rather than copying the folder’s contents, you can create a symbolic link instead: `sudo ln -s /usr/share/texmf /usr/share/R/texmf` Danielvartan (talk) 04:35, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

In a section titled "With pacman", we say that "There are some packages available on the AUR with the prefix r-" and "You can mix and match installing R packages with pacman and through R (see below)".

But, AFAIK, pacman is not able to install from the AUR directly. You either use a AUR helper or download the PKGBUILD yourself.

Should we rename the section?

Fhy (talk) 10:00, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

I think renaming makes sense. Novica (talk) 10:23, 7 June 2026 (UTC)

In a section titled "With pacman", we say that "There are some packages available on the AUR with the prefix r-" and "You can mix and match installing R packages with pacman and through R (see below)".

Is it really a good idea to mix the two?

At the very least we should specify how the user knows which R package is specifically used (the two methods may install different versions).

Fhy (talk) 10:01, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

I think mixing refers to having some AUR and then having some different non-AUR packages. So no real issue when using them. Novica (talk) 10:39, 7 June 2026 (UTC)

In early 2026 there were several discussions leading to consolidating the r related discussions on r/rstats: https://www.reddit.com/r/rstats/comments/1r10nev/objections_to_merging_rrlanguage_in_to_this/ I think the wiki page should be updated to reflect that.

--Novica (talk) 20:06, 22 February 2026 (UTC)