Log in at one of the terminals with your user name and password. Select the program Terminal from the “Applications”/“Accessories” menu. You will see a command prompt, which looks something like this:

[netid@ragnar ~]$

The tilde means that you are in your personal directory on ragnar, i.e., /home/netid/, where netid is your user name. This prompt accepts standard Unix/Linux commands.

You can now start programs by typing in R, stata, xstata, mathematica, or matlab. Here stata loads Stata in command line mode and xstata starts the graphical user interface (GUI) instead. The same applies for Matlab.