Monday, December 07, 2009

Easy installation of Microsoft Office 2007 in Fedora 12 using Wine

As far as I'm concerned, the only thing that forces me to use Windows or Mac from time to time is lack of Microsoft Office World, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 in Linux. In the web you can find info how to install it using wine in Ubuntu, but I could not find much about Fedora, especially Fedora 12. Here I present my experience of installing Office 2007 in Fedora 12. I must admit though, the what I'm going to write is based on my memory, so please feel free to comment if I skipped or made some mistakes.

First thing that we need to do is to install wine (in fedora 12 it is wine-1.1.32-1) sudo yum install wineNow we can install Microsoft Office 2007 from CD. I used Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise and I install only Word, Excel and PowerPoint and some default common office tools. For the installation I did not had to do any tweaking of wine, or did not had to use winetricks to download any additional dlls!

After the installation, I could start Word and Excel, but not PowerPoint. Also Equation editor in Word did not work, since the windows with default equation formulas were empty!

To fix it, it was necessary to go to Libraries in winecfg and in "New override for library" select usp10 and then set it to native as seen below:


This was enough to make equations work and also enough to start PowerPoint, though I'm not sure of the former.

I also tried to install Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2, but without success. To install this service packed I tried installing some stuff from winetricks, changing some dlls from build in to native, but nothing seemed to work.

In concussion, to install and run Microsoft World 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 nothing special was necessary. Just install wine from repositories, and set usp10 library to native in winecfg window. However, as I said at the beginning I'm writing this from my memory and I hope I did not skip something. Nevertheless, I think this post might be useful to other Linux users.