Installing Office 2000 under Wine

[skiman1979]

Hi all,

I recently tried installing MS Office 2000 under wine. SETUP.EXE started up fine, setup asked me for the product key, and began configuring office for installation. The progress bar got about 80% of the way through and it appeared to just stop. The computer sat idle with no hard drive or cd rom activity for a while, so I ended up logging into a shell as root, killing all the wine processes, and restoring my ~/.wine/fake_windows folder from a clean install (the one under /root).

The installer was running for about an hour before I killed the processes. Has anyone else had this problem? Do I just need to give it more time? According to what processes were running, it appeared to be trying to install IE.

[genesus]

I know this isn't an answer to your question but, since OpenOffice.org reads all office files, .doc, spreads, ppt, etc, why don't you give that a try, it runs pretty quickly, and you wouldn't have to waste the resources for running within wine

[Dapper Dan]

I agree with genesus. OO is really a nice office suite. If you just gotta have .docs and .rtfs, OO can save to those.

If you must have MS Office, you'd be better off using Codeweavers CrossoverOffice, rather than trying to install with regular Wine.

[sheds]

I actually started using the open office and i got a msg stating some problem. But, once i opened it at a work PC running XP, the file opened just fine. So i guess you could say you can do so too. Don't think that it can do exactly the same things that office does, cause it doesn't, but somethings you just don't use all the time.

[Stormblazer]

Why do you want M$ Office? OpenOffice.org has the same functionality, and can load/save M$'s formats if you have to use them. Also, I don't think M$ Office's licensing applies to running it in Wine...

[Dapper Dan]

Hi Stormblazer,

You are correct that OpenOffice provides a wide range of functionality equal to Windows, but there are reasons many Linux users in business need to run MS Office and its components.

Yes, you can save OO files in .doc, .txt, and .rtf but, if those files are sent to an MS Word user, (which most in business are), they will often not appear the same.

In some cases, this isn't a problem, but there are instances I encounter when it is important that word documents appear to an MS Word user exactly as they appeared when created in OO. Having a running copy of MS Word in Linux is handy for checking these before sending them out. I check them with Word 97 running on Win4Lin.

I'm not aware of any wording in the MS Office user agreement that restricts the use of its software to Windows only.

[techieMoe]

I'm not aware of any wording in the MS Office user agreement that restricts the use of its software to Windows only.

SHHHH!!! Don't give them any ideas!

[Dapper Dan]

I know that was meant as a joke, but you're probably right about giving them the idea! I wouldn't at all be surprised if they soon changed the wording to restrict its use to Microsoft OS only!

[MartinJ]

They develop it also for Mac OS.

[sarumont]

They develop it also for Mac OS.

They did, but don't anymore.