Installing MS Office on Fedora 15 — try 2

This is my second attempt at writing this article.  Office hasn’t been playing nicely with Fedora, but I finally have it working!  This How-To is not as clean as I would like, but it works.

First, let’s explore the motivation for installing Microsoft Office on Linux.  I would venture to guess that most if not all Linux distributions have LibreOffice in their repositories.  That is a full-featured office package that will probably do most of what you want.  In my opinion, Microsoft Office is just a little bit better, but that comes with a huge price tag!  The value is definitely on LibreOffice’s side.  But, here are some reasons you may consider Office instead:

• if you can get Office cheaper — many times you can get Office much cheaper through student licensing or corporate licensing
• if you do a lot of work on Office documents in conjunction with other Microsoft users — LibreOffice can open, edit, and save MS Office documents, but when you go back and forth, you will probably have to constantly fix small formatting issues

My motivation comes from working with textbooks.  I was working with large Word documents, and since they were so large, reformatting images and screenshots were not feasible every time we passed them back and forth between LibreOffice and MS Office.  Plus, Office was bought for me so the cost was not an issue!
So, with no further adue, let me walk you through what I did to install it on my Fedora 15 OS:

Installing Wine

First, I installed wine using yumex.  I learned that it was important for me to select the i686 version as opposed to the 64-bit version.

For me, this installed Wine version 1.3.24:

Installing Winetricks

Winetricks is a script that helps with installing Wine dependencies and such.  In this case, it proved very useful for running the installation for Office as a whole.

Unfortunately, no winetricks RPM exists in the repository, but the Wiki has some nice installation instructions.

First, I installed the cabextract dependency using yumex:

Then, I used these commands to download winetricks. Note that this assumes you already have a bin directory in your home.

wget -O ~/bin/winetricks http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks
chmod u+x ~/bin/winetricks
winetricks

Clearing out the WinePrefix

I have tried several attempts where I could not get Office to work. So, I am going to wipe that all away in this step. Be careful, and make sure you have not already installed something under wine before taking these steps.  You don’t need to do this step if you haven’t yet tried to install office.

First, run winetricks:

winetricks

Next, “Select the default wineprefix”:

Next, “Delete ALL DATA AND APPLICATIONS INSIDE THIS WINEPREFIX”:

The program cautiously asks for confirmation — again, make sure you haven’t installed something else here that you want to keep!

Now, your “.wine” directory is gone.

Installing Gecko

I am not sure this is necessary.  I was just having trouble and Wine kept complaining about Gecko.

I finally found some nice information about installing Gecko.  Tweaking leigh123linux’s commands, this is what I used:

curl http://winezeug.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/install-gecko.sh -o ~/bin/install-gecko.sh
chmod u+x ~/bin/install-gecko.sh
~/bin/install-gecko.sh

Installing Office

First, run winetricks:

winetricks

Since this is my first run, it configures a new .wine directory:

If you see this dialog throughout the process, just hit cancel. According to this post, it doesn’t work anyway.

When Winetricks opens,  I selected “Install an app”.

Then, I chose MS Office 2007 from the list:

I got this message, but this is to be expected.  According to several blog posts, I read that Power Point won’t work without this riched20 tweak.

If you haven’t already inserted the CD, winetricks will prompt you at this point.

After a few seconds, the installer started and requested the Product Key:

Next, it asked for me to agree to the agreement. Then, it was ready to install. I just clicked the big “Install Now” button.

After a few minutes, it completed, and I just clicked close.

Once I clicked close, it opened Winetricks again. Notice that it shows a new Wineprefix for Office. I cancelled at this point, because there was nothing else to do.

The First Run

I found the icons installed under the “Other” menu.

First, it asks for User Name information:

Then, it goes through the configuration process that takes a while!

The activation wizard was next. I chose over the Internet:

It worked with no problem.

In the Welcome Wizard, I unchecked all the options:

I chose not to keep it up to date — I don’t think it works anyway:

Running from the Commandline

If you want to run the program from the command line, you can’t just type winword.exe. I dug through my Main Menu application, and here is the command that I found:

env WINEPREFIX="/home/skp/.local/share/wineprefixes/office2007pro" wine C:\\windows\\command\\start.exe /Unix /home/skp/.local/share/wineprefixes/office2007pro/dosdevices/c:/users/skp/Start\ Menu/Programs/Microsoft\ Office/Microsoft\ Office\ Word\ 2007.lnk

So, that is how it went for me. I wish it was a little cleaner, but at least I have it working!