Stata 15.1 Ubuntu Linux, Icons not appearing

[Shane Gleason]

Hello everyone,

I recently shifted institutions and when I went to install Stata on the most recently updated version of Linux Mint (an Ubuntu variant), icons do not appear after install.

I have tried a number of fixes from Statalist and elsewhere which include:
https://github.com/kylebarron/stata-png-fix
https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...-distributions

Nothing seems to be working--- while I am able to run through these fixes, the error persists.

If this were just the folder icon for 'open' it would be one thing- but the issue extends to fields not appearing in the graphs menu etc.

Any ideas? As it stands, Stata is fairly unusable :-/

Shane

[William Lisowski]

Welcome to Statalist.

If you have't already done so, it's probably time to directly contact Stata Technical Services for an update to the 4+ years old advice in the Statalist topic you link to. I see no indication on the thread that the issue has been raised with Stata Technical Services after the first round of advice. Although perhaps by starting a new topic today, rather than reposting to the old topic, you may draw some attention.

https://www.stata.com/support/tech-support/contact/

I will say, I agree with others that four years with a "workaround" seems a bit much. At this point Statacorp would be well advised to acknowledge and address this problem in their official Stata for UNIX FAQs rather than leave users to find the Statalist thread, if they happen to.

Please let Statalist know what you hear.

[Daniel Bela]

Hi Shane,

the issue is that Stata for Linux does depend on "old" (i.e. not included in modern distributions) variants of two libraries, namely libpng (version 1.6.2) and zlib (version 1.2.3), to display the shipped icons. I second William Lisowski's point that it would be time for Stata Technical Services to have a look at Stata's dependencies, and fix the issue. However, this probably will not, if at all, happen before Stata 16.

If you want to implement the workaround mentioned in the said posts, you have to download the source tarballs for both libraries from the respective SourceForge websites (i.e. libpng, zlib), compile them on your machine, put them to any directory on your machine and start Stata using the corresponding path as a library path. This is, essentially, the solution Lars Vilhuber came up with on his BitBucket page. Lars solved this by creating a pseudo-launcher for Stata that delivers the library path for the manually compiled libraries to Stata itself.

When I first found this workaround, it made me think about a second thing that bugged me for years when using Stata for Linux: the Stata installer does not add menu shortcuts and file associations to the Linux desktop environment. After pseudo-solving this year after year by manually creating a Stata shortcut after each installation of a new Stata version, I was a little fed up with the situation.

About one and a half years ago, I put up a shell script that tries to implement a solution for both issues once Stata is installed; you can find the source code and a short README file here on GitHub, and can download the the ready-to-use binary file (stata_integration.bin) from the releases page.

Be warned, this is only tested under Ubuntu and a few of its derived distributions (Mint and Kubuntu, that is). Also, The script is far from perfect. It has been written for my personal and a few colleagues' use, and this might be a little different from your on needs. However, feel free to try it until the issue is fixed by StataCorp itself (hopefully). Feedback is of course welcome, ideally using the issue tracker on the GitHub page.

Regards
Bela

[Shane Gleason]

Hi all-

The Stata folks reached out to me. In general- they pointed me to the script in the third post on this thread ( https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...-distributions ).

They did stress that the Linux version of Stata is supported in GNOME, not XFCE.

However.... Bela's stata_integration.bin script works like a charm. In Linux Mint XFCE 19, however, it does depend on libpng-dev

Thank you to both of you for your help. I sincerely hope that Bela's script will be tested and incorporated into the eventual(?) Stata official fix.


Shane

[William Lisowski]

Thank you for closing the loop. In particular, neither when I search Statalist, nor when I search Stata.com (which cover's Stata's FAQs), nor when I search the Getting Started with Stata for UNIX PDF for Release 15, do I find anything like

the Linux version of Stata is supported in GNOME

So I think your followup represents an addition to our collective knowledge - although admittedly past topics have shared the empirical discovery that it works better on GNOME than alternatives.

[Shane Gleason]

Hi all-

I hate to reopen this thread...

On my desktop at home (which I had previously used Daniel's fantastic script on), I had to do a reinstall (I royally messed up the system). This resulted in upgrading to Bionic and the Stata bin no longer works. No amount of tinkering seems to be working. I am curious, Daniel, if you have a Bionic update for that script or if you'd be kind enough to help me out? My laptop and my work desktop are still showing icons, but it makes me hesitant to ever change anything on those systems.

Thanks--- I really appreciate it.

Shane

[Shane Gleason]

I have found a work around. I used one of the scripts which Daniel draws upon (discussed here: https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...-distributions ).

This gets the icons back.