Office 2007 on wine on Linux — seamless!

The wine project is very impressive. Old Office 2007 DVD, so why not? Word has not changed much in 20 years. Had to do some cleaning up first.

I used PlayOnLinux but chose manual install and pointed it to the setup.exe file on the DVD, and specified 32-bit to matchthe Office version (and  made sure 32-bit wine was installed).

Installer ran succeasfully; clicked Close.

PlayOnLinux asked about shortcuts to make. Chose Winword then Excel and PPT; they appeared in the PlayOnLinux dialog.

The software wants to be activated…  but the software is very old! I chose over internet, and it seemed to work. ??? (Or more likely just did not complain.)

Cannot sign up to Microsoft update service, of course.

But seems ok. Works basically seamlessly.

I find I can print from Word 2007 to any of the printers installed via CUPS — for example, my Apple ImageWriter II.

So I can run Microsoft Word from 2007 on Linux from 2022 and print seamlessly to an Apple printer from 1986. Now that’s convergence!

Office 2010 on wine on Linux

I just wanted to see if I could use Office 2010 through wine. winehq says it should work somewhat. Host is 32 bit, Intel.

System profile (Netbook with 1GB RAM, Atom N550 chip — quite old):

$ uname -a
Linux lauenetbook 4.9.0-9-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 4.9.168-1 (2019-04-12) i686 GNU/Linux
$ cat /etc/debian_version
9.9

1 Had the office 2010 .exe installer (so not an install from CD)
2 Used PlayOnLinux (PoL) to install it into a new wine prefix (default)
3 Created shortcuts in PoL and launched
4 Some bugs, including ‘IOPL not enabled’
5 A little fiddle:

$ cd /lib/i386-linux-gnu/
$ sudo ln -s libudev.so.1 libudev.so.0

6 That solved one little error, but did not fix it
7 In PoL, installed MS core fonts
8 In PoL, installed gdiplus
9 Still getting error ‘IOPL not enabled’
10 Manually, on the command line, set the value for WINEPREFIX to …

$ WINEPREFIX=/home/username/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/Office2010/
$ export WINEPREFIX

11 But then I launched PoL again and I’m pretty sure it ignored that
12 I reinstalled over the top of the first install, using the same .exe installer and same defaults
13 After I decided to overwrite without first erasing, the installer did not ask me as many questions as it did the first time, it just installed
14 And then it worked!

It works!

I don’t know what I did. But it works now. I can’t really offer advice, but I guess you can try this process…?

Some points: The first time I ran the installer, it did not generate shortcuts automagically, and I generated them myself; the second time I ran the installer it did generate shortcuts and even dumped them on the desktop unasked.

So…

• Maybe run the installer twice?
• Maybe do the libudev thing?
• Maybe use PoL to install gdiplus manually?
• Maybe all of them?

I dunno.