Installing Stata 10

This post is a summary of the way I installed Stata 10 in my computer. However, the first thing I did was to check a couple of places to get an idea of how to start the process (the best site where I found info is Andrew Dyck's blog). As a consequence, the info presented in this post is not original at all, but summarizes step by step what I had to do to get Stata working on my system.

• In order to use the GUI, Stata will call two libraries: libtiff.so.3 and libgtksourceview1.0.so.0 (these libraries are not needed if you want to run Stata on a terminal mode). 

• Go to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager and checked whether the package libgtksourceview1.0 is installed. If not, mark it (it automatically installed all required dependencies) and install it.

• For some reason, Ubuntu 10.10 has the libtiff.so.4 installed, which at first glance should not create any problem, but it does. The solution is to create a symbolic link, which you do by running the following command (in the terminal): sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libtiff.so.4 /usr/local/lib/libtiff.so.3 

• Now your system should be ready to correctly execute Stata (GUI), so all we have to do is to install the software. 
• Create the directory whether Stata will be installed. I recommend to follow Stata's instruction and create a folde in the /usr/local folder. This is done by running on a terminal: sudo mkdir /usr/local/stata10 . Move to this foloder: cd /usr/local/stata10.

• Go to the folder where you have the software (usually the CD unit) and run the install script: sudo /media/cdrom/install . Follow the instructions in this script.

• After the installation has ended, run the licence script: sudo ./stinit Here you'll have to enter the licence info that came with the software.

• You're done! All you have to do now is to run ./stata to have Stata on the command line or ./xstata to lunch the GUI. If you want you can add Stata to the Menu right-click on Ubuntu Menu and select Edit Menus. Click on the submenu you want Stata to appear (I out it on Office) and click New Item. Complete the required info. To change the default icon (and use Stata's), go to the CD and click open stata10.ico with some graphic program (I used Inkscape) and save it as svg in the /usr/local/stata10 folder. You should now be able to select this icon as your default icon by clicking on the icon image in the create launcher window.