Migrating from Windows to Wine - Office 2007 on Linux
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After the operating system itself, this is Microsoft's most popular product. It started to define the way in which we perceive a word editor, table creator and so on back in 1989. At the start of 2007, Microsoft revolutionized its design with the introduction of the ribbon.
It is true that there is a free alternative under the name of OpenOffice, which is already up to version 3. However, some say that the ribbon makes editing much, much simpler, so with this smart move, MS managed to surpass its competitors.
Regardless, let us install it on your system. First, obviously, you will need the suite. If you do not have it now, you may download a trial version from the Microsoft site. Once this is done, we need to make some preparations before we install it.
We will use Winetricks for this. So if you have not obtained it by now, do so by starting up the terminal and entering the command:
wget www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
Now we will install a couple of dependencies for the office suite. Enter the command:
sh winetricks msxml3 dotnet20 gdiplus riched20 riched30 vcrun2005sp1
This will also select what we need to install. You will need to pass through several setups. Just install everything as you would under Windows. Not all of them are applications. Some are just DLLs you will need for a part of the suite to work. Wait for all of this to complete.
When finished, change the operating system of Wine to Windows Vista. Use either Winetricks for this or winecfg from the Wine menu. Mount/insert the CD/DVD/ image and proceed with the installation as you would normally (start the ssetup.exe).
In some cases, the installation may stop at 75%. If this is the case, just kill the process. The office suite will be installed. Just make sure that it is stuck; you do not want to kill it before it finishes.
You may now start the suite; however, some people have reported that Office bringing up weird errors via Vista Wine it is recommended that you change the OS of Wine back to XP. Again, you can use winetricks or winecfg.
What is the result? Well, I am writing this article in it. Word works just fine. There are a few glitches, as sometimes Gnome overtakes a small portion of the upper bar when you go to read mode (two-page format). What is more troublesome is that sometimes, when I save the document under NTFS file system, the application just freezes.
I managed to avoid this by saving my files only to the Linux File System. This is quite strange if you ask me; nevertheless, it works. You can use it with no problem. Everything works just as it should, and if you added the option to incorporate the style of your Linux (in my case, Ubuntu 8.10) the screen shot below shows you what you may get.
Excel mainly works, though there are some issues with charts.
PowerPoint also works with no problem, but Access, Outlook and Equation Editor do not work. Overall, this is a job well done. This application is in a platinum state, and you can use it most of the time with no restrictions under Linux with Wine.
