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Assuming that you restarted Stata after the update I'm not sure what would be causing this. strtoreal ( http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?mf_strtoreal ) is function that should be part of Stata.

You should be able to check whether there is anything else to update with the command
update query

If you ...

It sounds as if you may not have Stata fully up to date. According to http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?whatsnew11 the putmata command was added to Stata 11 in the 11feb2010 update.

Ideally you would update Stata with the following command:
update all

If for some reason you are unable to do this ...

Could you please try running the command again, but this time with the option viewfullmacro added to the end?, i.e.
runmlwin normexam cons standlrt, level2(school: cons) level1(student: cons) nopause viewfullmacro
This should pop up a window containing the MLwiN commands to fit the model. Could ...

To answer your other question, runmlwin should support factor variables in the fixed part but this hasn't been widely tested.

You can turn off this error message by searching for the following text in runmlwin.ado:


if `numrp`l'vars' == 0 {
if "`diagonal'"~="" || "`elements'"~="" || "`reset'"~="" || "`residuals'"~="" || "`weightvar'"~="" || "`mmids'"~="" || "`mmweights'"~="" || "`carids'"~="" || "`carweights ...

If you can send me an example worksheet, along with instructions on how to replicate the problem I will investigate what is causing this error.

To answer the question about the inconsistency between the help file and the runmlwin error message, it is the error message that is wrong as MLwiN does allow offsets in negative binomial models. We will fix this message in the next release, but if you are happy editing runmlwin.ado the fix is to ...

As part of fitting discrete outcome models MLwiN uses and names a number of columns. You can see an example of this on the line referred to in the error message that you describe:

name c1180 'H' C1181 'F~(H)' C1182 'H*' C1183 'P' c1184 'MASK' c1189 'Y-VAR'

If when it gets to this point you ...

If you click on the "set styles" button on the "graph options" window you will see that you can set a column to contain the graph highlight settings. You can also change this with the GALL command. You can edit this column to determine which points are highlighted. The values are 1+the highlight ...

MLwiN does appear to run fairly well on Unix type systems if you run it with Wine (http://www.winehq.org/). We have recently updated our FAQs to provide some details on how to set this up (see http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmm/software/m ... .html#unix).