runmlwin and Linux?

[kaiarzheimer]

Dear all, I'm thrilled by the the concept of runmlwin but seem to be stuck on the wrong side of the great OS divide.
I'm working with Stata 11.2 (MP4) under Ubuntu Linux. I am able to launch MLwiN 2.24 manually using wine 1.3, but I cannot even install runmlwin from within Stata because the package does not contain a plugin for Linux.

Are there any plans for a Linux plugin? Is the plugin strictly necessary to run mlwin? Does it make any sense to bypass the plugin check by trying to install runmlwin manually?

Any help/pointers/comments highly appreciated.
Best wishes,
Kai

[ChrisCharlton]

We have not had any reports of MLwiN working under Wine before, which is why we haven't created versions of the plugin for Linux or Mac. I would be very interested in hearing how well it runs in this environment.

If runmlwin is unable to find a particular plugin it should be able to fall back to either using an equivalent Stata built-in command, or by skipping the plugin call. The only plugin that is actually necessary is runmlwin_mcmcdiagnostics.plugin, which is used to calculate the diagnostic information if you choose to estimate your model using MCMC. I have attached a version of this for linux (compiled under Centos 5.7 64 bit), although as I don't have access to a Linux version of Stata I cannot test this.

[kaiarzheimer]

Chris,
thanks for that, will test the plugin asap. I ran a couple of the models from the userguide using wine 1.3 and the latest version of MLwiN. So far, I haven't encountered any glitches.

[ChrisCharlton]

Since your initial post we have done some testing and as a result have updated the FAQ on running MLwiN on non-Windows systems (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmm/software/mlwin/features/sysreq.html#unix).

Once we have a package that is confirmed to work we also intend to provide an FAQ on using runmlwin on these systems.