Re-testing MS Office on Linux

Last time I tried to run Microsoft Office on Linux was in the Wine 6.x staging / 5.x stable days, and now I’m running Wine 8.21 staging, so safe to say it’s been a while.

I mostly don’t mind since I use Office 365 Online and Libreoffice for everything I need, but I wanted to try just out of curiosity, so I am.

The most sensible thing would probably be to use Office 2021 / Office 365, however I don’t feel like a ~4G download, so ill just use a convenient copy of Office 2019 Pro+ I have sat around on my hard disk. Should be new enough.

After making a new wine prefix to keep everything in, I set my prefix to Windows 10 and run the installer:

WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 wineboot -i
WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 winetricks win10
WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 wine Office\ 2019\ ProPlus/Office/Setup64.exe

The orange “getting things ready” screen appeared just fine, then it crashed… oh.

A wine appdb page said that i must use “a 32 bit prefix and winbind”. Also that I must have a working Gecko.

Starting again then:

rm -rf winepref_off2019
WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 WINEARCH=win32 wineboot -i
WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 wine iexplore appdb.winehq.org
WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 winetricks win10
WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 wine Office\ 2019\ ProPlus/Office/Setup32.exe

…same. damn.

So, turns out I didn’t actually install “winbind”, which is a part of samba (this causes “ntlm_auth” errors).

pacman -S samba
WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 wine Office\ 2019\ ProPlus/Office/Setup32.exe

I got a “OfficeClickToRun.exe had to close” wine debugger dialog, but then, wow! The installer started!

Except it doesn’t actually go anywhere, it just sits forever there. Damn.

Tried again and got this, ouch.

I decided to try the suggestion here and ran

WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 winetricks msxml6 corefonts cjkfonts

This did not help so I tried what was suggested here

WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 winetricks corefonts msxml6 msxml4 vcrun2005 vcrun2008 vcrun2010 vcrun2012 vcrun2013 vcrun2019

No dice.

Decided to try this, minus the win7 part.

WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 wine reg.exe ADD HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Wine\\Direct3D
WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 wine reg.exe ADD HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Wine\\Direct3D /v MaxVersionGL /t REG_DWORD /d 0x30002
WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 winetricks riched20 msxml6

Still no!!!

Testing one more before I give up

WINEPREFIX=/home/sink/winepref_off2019 winetricks riched20 gdiplus msxml6 mspatcha riched30 dotnet20 dotnet40 mfc100 corefonts

Nope I give up. Office 2019 still cannot run in Wine 8.21.

Oh, and that wineprefix is now 2.1GB. A fresh 32bit one measures 502MB.

Damn. See you here again soon.

— sink