These are the steps for installing the 11 year old Microsoft Office 2000 on a standard Linux machine without the need to run it under a virtualised Microsoft Windows installation (e.g. Virtual Box).
No doubt some wag will comment ‘why bother? .. just use LibreOffice‘. (Can you spell ‘l-e-g-a-c-y a-p-p-l-i-c-a-t-i-o-n‘, sunshine?).
The fact is I did have to do it, and having invested a couple of days of my time in getting it just so, I think it is only good karma that I put this up where other people can find it, since I’ve relied similarly on other people’s work in the past and it’s time to pay it forward.
If this note just saves one person from having to work this out for themselves, or worse still, be unable to migrate from some old Windows version that doesn’t even work on modern hardware, then that will be worth the effort in writing this article alone.
It’s also worth noting, that most of messing around with DLLs etc NOT needed if you are not planning to use Access but just are still in love with say, Word 2000. The good news is that the standard version of Office 2000 seems to install and run reasonably well under the latest v1.3 incarnation of Wine pretty much out of the box. In fact for some odd reason, it seems to be very much faster to start under Linux that it is under its native O/S (W2K or XP) on the same hardware!
It seems to be Access that needs you to go the extra mile when running under Wine.
Prerequisites: Wine v1.3 or later.
These instructions have been tested with Wine 1.3.20. Try it with earlier versions at your own discretion. Don’t blame me if your cat dies.
For Ubuntu 11.04 this means uninstalling the 1.1 version that supplied with the Natty distro, if installed.
sudo apt-get purge wine1.1
Now add the 1.3 repository
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
Now click here to install Wine 1.3
On the Ubuntu start panel, do Applications-Wine-Configure.
A Windows 98/2000 style dialogue will appear.
Under the Applications tab change the version of Windows from XP to Windows 2000. This may not be strictly necessary, but it seemed to be the right thing to do. (If it works for you without, let me know. If this conflicts with other Wine installed programs that need XP then you may need to create separate wine-prefixes.)
DLLS
You need the following three Windows DLLs installed. winetricks is a great little script that will pull them from Microsoft’s site, and install them, all in one operation.
(i) MFC42
/usr/bin/winetricks mfc42
(ii) MDAC28
/usr/bin/winetricks mdac28
(iii) JET40
/usr/bin/winetricks jet40
INSTALLING OFFICE 2000
1. Insert the Office 2000 Professional disk in the CDdrive
2. From a terminal window do
sudo mkdir /mnt/cdrom && sudp mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom -o unhide
3. Open a Places window from the Natty panel (top start bar). You should see 09procd01. Browse it.
4. Double-click SETUP.EXE. This should bring up the familiar Office 2000 installation dialogue.
5. Select Custom Install and remove Outlook, and the obnoxious Office Assistant, adding in any extra converters etc you might think you need (you can always add them later). NB: If you think you need a talking paper clip you need more help than I can give you!
6. Download and install the Postgres-ODBC driver from the Postgres website at http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/odbc/versions/msi/
Install psqlodbc.msi by double clicking it.WINE should now start the installation process for the Postgres ODBC drive.
Now test it’s all working by running Access, and doing Get-External-Data, Link Tables, and connect to the remote Postgres database.
That’s it.
Please let me know if this was useful for anyone …
Thank you very much!
As long as the macro engine of li-pen office cannot digest MS VB code properly some work has to be done this way.