Quick and dirty HOWTO: Office 2003 + Wine +linux

NOTE:I finally managed to recover a part of this article, which went lost during the b2evo-wordpress migration.
Luckly I managed to recover it thanks to someone who pasted it here: http://vsalteglofsheim.de/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main_Page didn’t gave me the credit, but in the end I was able to recover it, so thanks! If you find this HOWTO useful, please at least cite the source.
Since them, I stopped using Office 2003 and resorted to Openoffice since I don’t need to use Macros anymore.
But I have seen a certain interest in this article, so I will pubblish it here again.

DISCLAIMER: You can damage your system following the steps outlined below. I will not be liable for any damages and copyright issues…you are on yourself. There may also be unspotted errors in the text or the relevant commands may be different for your system: please understand the commands before issueing them, cut&paste is not a good idea from now on.

An important resource for Wine users: Wine doors
and also Frank’s corner


This is a quick and dirty HOWTO to install Microsoft Office 2003 under Wine. The system used is Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 x64 . On other system your mileage may vary.

Pre-steps:

Install wine. If you are going to do that on Ubuntu, please note that x64 packages are, at the time I’m writing, only available on Feisty. There’s plenty of HOWTO on installing Wine, so I won’t cover it here. I suggest you to try Wine with a program that is known to run and install. I used SwitcherCad III and everything runs perfect. When your Wine is running fine, you then need your Office 2003 disc. Mount it with the option -o unhide. This will avoid having problems with hidden files during installation.

mount -t iso9660 -o unhide /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

There you are, you have your installation files under /mnt/cdrom. A further step is now required to run the installation, or your installation will end saying “Installation source has been corrupted”. This has to do with missing XML parser and Internet explorer. We are going to go around that one by installing the XML parser and telling WINE to use the native Msxml3.dll instead of the built-in one. . Install Microsoft XML Parser (MSXML)

Download it and move toward the downloaded file, then run:

msiexec /i msxml3.msi

if you have installed Wine correctly, you should have msiexec available. Complete the installation, then launch:
c9@dirac:~/Desktop$winecfg

now you should have a wine windows. Now select Libraries–>Choose msxml3 from New Override for library and then Add. The select the added library and choose Edit. Select Native, then builtin, the “OK”.

Installation

Now it’s time to start the Office installation. Move to the mounted cdrom:

c9@dirac:~/Desktop$cd /mnt/cdrom

and run
c9@dirac:~/Desktop$wine Setup.exe

From now on, it doesn’t differ that much from a tipical Office installation.

[Update] There’s may be some issue with Visual Basic macro. I did not have the time to check properly, but not everything did work correctly. Google was’t helpful today, so I’ll try when I’ll have some time .

TO DO: It can be interesting to try to take an original Msxml3.dll from a Windows system and register it in Wine, then saying to use the native one instead of the built-in one. This could save the XML parser installation.

I didn’t try, someone will? Some information can be found at the step “Reregister the Msxml3.dll file”.

Credits: Frank from Frank’s Corner for the original Office HOWTO and the suggestion on how to install .msi files.

Tested on:

Wine 0.9.40~winehq0~ubuntu~7.04-1

Microsoft XML Parser (MSXML) 3.0 Service Pack 7 (SP7) (italian)

on Ubuntu Feisty 7.04.

2 commenti su “Quick and dirty HOWTO: Office 2003 + Wine +linux”

  1. In my case, your mount command solved the problem “Installation source has been corrupted”, so it seems the error message can also be caused by hidden files…

    Rispondi
  2. ah and by the way: In my case, I had to RENAME the old .dlls before I could install the msxml and richedit dlls. Simply cd to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32 and
    ” mv msxml3.dll msxml3.dll.old” and ” mv msxml3r.dll msxml3.dllr.old”

    Rispondi

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