I recently had to re-install Stata 11 for Unix after upgrading my operating system to Ubuntu 11.04 Natty. I followed Stata’s installation instructions and they worked fine. If you want Stata to ‘just work’, then I recommend installing the statically linked version instead of the dynamically linked version. But if you’re familiar with Linux package dependencies you might disagree, and check out the blog posts by Andrew Dyck and Jonas Ranstam for helpful post-installation instructions for the dynamically linked version.

Now, assuming you’ve got Stata installed properly, you will probably want to update your version and set and save your preferences. Because these tasks are not as easy as you would like, I’ve documented them here.

Updating Stata version

Why would you want to update your newly installed Stata software? Because it’s probably not the latest version, and therefore contains bugs. Stata 11.0 is rumoured to contain a bug that affects its calculations (I can’t actually find a online bug report for it at the moment) which means your statistics and therefore your conclusions could be way off the mark! So protect your academic credibility and enter:

update query

If the outcome is ‘all files up to date’ then you’re safe. If not, you want to type:

update all

and when that’s all done, restart Stata like this:

update swap

Setting your preferences

After you have applied the update, you can change your settings through the Preferences screen (I changed the default font to ‘DejaVu Sans Mono Book’ because the default font is awful). For some reason Stata wouldn’t save my preferences before the update, but the update to Stata 11.2 seems to have resolved this.