Microsoft Office 2010 on Arch Linux and Ubuntu

We have a mix of Linux and Windows users at work. My department use Linux and the rest of the business use Windows. We been running a mixture of LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, which works pretty well until you start trying to collaborate, then it gets messy pretty quickly.

So, it was decided at the end of 2012 to migrate everyone, including the Linux users, to Microsoft Office 2010.

What follows is an installation guide for Wine and the 60 day trial version of Office Home and Business 2010 on Arch Linux and Ubuntu. Most of this information was sourced from the Wine AppDB

• http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=17336

Wine for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (or better)

Install Wine on Ubuntu as follows.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer samba wine1.5 wine-gecko1.8 wine-mono

For 64-bit also install the following.

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Wine for Arch Linux

Install Wine on Arch Linux as follows.

sudo pacman -S --needed icoutils libwbclient libxslt lib32-mpg123 p11-kit lib32-p11-kit samba wine winetricks wine-mono wine_gecko
sudo packer -S --noedit --noconfirm ttf-ms-fonts

For 64-bit also install the following.

sudo packer -S --noedit --noconfirm lib32-libwbclient lib32-libxslt

Installing Office 2010

Once Wine is installed, installing Office 2010 is the same for Arch Linux and Ubuntu.

Create a clean wine prefix.

export WINEPREFIX="${HOME}/.msoffice2010"
export WINEARCH="win32"
winecfg

Click the Libraries tab, select riched20 and click Add. The default entry should read riched20 (native, builtin). Click Apply, then click OK. This will ensure that PowerPoint starts and selection boxes display correctly.

Install libxml6 and corefonts with winetricks

winetricks msxml6 corefonts

Start the Office 2010 setup. In the example below X17-75058.exe is the name of the 60 day trial version of Office Home and Business 2010 that I downloaded.

wine X17-75058.exe

Follow the installation wizard, we are only interested in running the essentials, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This is what I selected during the install.

• Enter your serial number.
• Leave ticked Attempt to automatically activate my product online.
• Click Continue
• Tick I accept the terms of this agreement
• Click Continue
• Click Customise
  • Microsoft Access (Trial) [Not Available]
  • Microsoft Excel [Run all from My Computer]
  • Microsoft OneNote [Not Available]
  • Microsoft Outlook [Not Available]
  • Microsoft PowerPoint [Run all from My Computer]
  • Microsoft Publisher (Trial) [Not Available]
  • Microsoft Visio Viewer [Run from My Computer]
  • Microsoft Word [Run all from My Computer]
  • Office Shared Features [Defaults]
  • Office Tools [Defaults]
• Click Instal Now.
• Click Close.

That’s it. Office 2010 is installed and should be associated with the appropriate file types.

Some Issues

Here are some of the issues we noticed running Office 2010 under Wine.

• Always install Office 2010 into it’s own WINEPREFIX. You are less likely to run into problem that way.
• Online updates do not work. Fortunately, the trial installer has SP1 integrated.
• If you purchase Office 2010 licenses you can still use the trial installer with your purchased license key(s).
• We did test a trial of CrossOver. However, it wouldn’t activate Office 2010 on Arch Linux but did activate on Ubuntu.
• Files saved to cifs mounts are set read-only. This might be a Wine issue or due to the unusual way we have our file server configured, we are still investigating.

Uninstalling Office 2010

Should you ever need to, you can uninstall Office 2010 as follows.

rm -rfv ${HOME}/.msoffice2010/
rm -rfv ~/.local/share/applications/wine-extension-*
rm -rfv ~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/Microsoft\ Office/