How to install BigMemory and bigrf on windows OS

Question

I have been trying to install bigmemory on my R installation. My OS is windows 7 64 bit and I have tried it on R V2.15.1,2.15.2 and 3.0.1 64 bit but I cant get it to work.

I have tried several options

1. download the current source and run the command in R v3.0.1
   install.packages("D:/Downloads/bigmemory_4.4.3.tar.gz", repos = NULL, type="source")
   but this gives an error "ERROR: Unix-only package"
2. download older sources and run a similar commands, in the various installations of R V2 V3 etc,
   This gives me an error "ERROR: configuration failed for package 'bigmemory'"

Any ideas? I am actually trying to install bigrf but bigmemory seems to be a dependency. Is there any workaround for this?

Many thanks

Answer 1

Seems the github version installs OK on Windows:

install.packages(c("BH","biglm"))
library(devtools)
devtools::install_github('kaneplusplus/bigmemory')
library(bigmemory)

the package authors told me they are fixing the CRAN one to work on Windows again too.

Answer 2

Going to the CRAN page here, shows you that you have to compile the sources on windows. Google how to do it or look at official document : here Of course if package A depends on B you have to install B before A yourself.

EDIT: actually it says OS_type : unix