Installing Office 2010 on Ubuntu using Wine

Short version

Switching to the latest Wine version (1.7) and installing winbind were additional steps needed.

Long version

The instructions are for Ubuntu 15.04 64bit. This borrows heavily from Crag Gomez's guide, so thanks to him for a lot of these instructions.

1. Install the latest version of Wine - dotnet20 installations cause issues otherwise

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
   sudo apt-get install wine winetricks
   

2. Install mesa OpenGL - may already exist, so the below commands would simply state that.

   sudo apt-get install mesa-utils mesa-utils-extra libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libgl1-mesa-dev
   

3. Create softlinks for the 32bit OpenGL librariies (needed only for 64 bit systems)

   sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so
   sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libGL.so
   

4. Create a new WINEPREFIX for Office - this will be the directory that contains your files. You can use any directory, but I followed the standard Wineprefix directory (add your username).

   export WINEPREFIX="/home/xuananh/.wine32"
   

5. Set the WINEARCH to 32 bit. Office 10 32 bit is the version that works best.

   export WINEARCH="win32"
   

6. Install winbind. Office installation stops midway if this is not done

   sudo apt-get install winbind -y 
   

7. Install dotnet20, msxml6 and corefonts modules using winetricks.
   Once you run the command you will be asked if you want to install a Mono package as well as a Gecko package - select no for both. wine-mono and wine-gecko should have already been installed when you installed wine

   winetricks dotnet20 msxml6 corefonts
   

8. Do the actual Windows install.
   Browse to the folder with the installation media and run

   wine setup.exe
   

9. Change settings for libraries in the wineprefix after installing
   • Run winetricks
   • Select Run winecfg. select the "Libraries" tab.
   • You should see msxml6 (native, built-in) in the Existing overrides section. Highlight it and click Edit and select Native (Windows) and click OK. Now, it should show up as *msxml6 (native).
   • Then add the riched20 and gdiplus libraries from the New override for library section and make sure these are also set as "Native"
10. Your office programs should show up in the Unity lenses.