Mike Southby

Linux is growing in popularity more and more with every year that passes, in recent years this has been made ever more public with the Ubuntu distributions which are now real Windows alternatives for the average end user.  Just as with Mac sofware, Ubuntu comes ‘out of the box’ with everything you could possibly need to go about your day to day business; best of all everything is essentially free thanks to its open source underpinnings.

However there are drawbacks.

Ubuntu comes bundled with OpenOffice, a Microsoft Office alternative from Sun.  It works really well; giving you all the features you have come to expect from using Office on Windows, but – and here’s the real killer – even though it has the same functionability, it looks different, acts different and has different native file formats. This alone is enough for a lot of people not to give Ubuntu or other Linux distributions a try, afterall, why would you want to switch to another OS when you have Windows installed already, do all of your work in Office and are familiar with both.  Microsoft Office not being compatible with Ubuntu is a real problem.

As more and more Linux distributions have been developed and their popularity has increased, so has the need for a stable solution to using Office in a Linux environment, it’s been very ‘messy’ but a lot of people have had varying success using Wine.  Wine let’s you run Windows software in a Linux environment which when it works, works great.  However, Office had always been one of those annoyances that doesn’t seem to work under Wine as it should.  Fortunately though, Wine has been improved over the years and now their is a solution.

For the purposes of this guide, I am using the latest version of Ubuntu, Wine and Microsoft Office; Ubuntu 9.10, Wine 1.1.32 beta and Microsoft Office 2007.

So, to get Office working on Ubuntu, read on.

Firstly, we need to make sure that all previous versions of Wine are uninstalled.  Previous versions of Wine suffered from a regression issue and will not work with Office 2007 so:

• Click on System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager
• In Synaptic Package Manager, type Wine in the search field and highlight any existing instances of Wine which are installed on your system, making sure to choose Mark for Complete Removal and then Apply
• We now need to remove the exiting .wine folder by navigating to Places > Home Folder.  You’ll need to press CTRL+H to unhide the .wine folder so that you can delete it

Next, we need to install the latest version of Wine, but before doing so it won’t hurt to give your machine a restart.  Once you’ve done this, do the following:

• Download the latest version of Wine from http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/archive/index.html, I used v1.1.32 beta.  When the popup box appears, choose to Open with Gdebi package Installer.  Once the package begins installing, you will get a warning dialogue.  Acknowledge this and continue through the install process

We can now install Microsoft Office 2007, so pop the installation disc into the drive and wait for the system to mount it:

• Navigate to the installer by going to Places > Office12 and right click setup.exe chosing Open with Wine Windows Program Loader
• Now follow the installation process as if it were a Windows installtion [screenshot], but choosing a custom installation and choosing the program options you’ll need [screenshot].  Note:  Unfortunately, not all of the office applications seem to work correctly under Ubuntu (or Linux generally) so I’d recommend just installing Word, Excel and PowerPoint.  Access and Outlook have known issues.

Once Office has finished installing [screenshot], we need to install winetricks which is a useful tool to use some common workarounds to some of the deficiencies in Wine:

• Open your Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type:
  sudo wget www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks [screenshot]
• Next, install cabextract in order to be able to extract the contents of Microsoft cabinet files.  To do this, type the following:
  sudo apt–get install cabextract [screenshot]
• Next we need to install MS core fonts, Visual C++, MS scripting and Jscript, type the following:
  sh winetricks corefonts tahoma vcrun2005spl wsh56js

The next stage is to confgure Wine itself:

• As we already have a Terminal window open, type:
  winecfg [screenshot]
• On the Libraries tab, add 2 new variables:
  riched20
usp10
• Once you have done this [screenshot], highlight or click riched20 and click Edit, change to Native Windows then Apply and OK

Finally, we can now test Office, navigate to Word; Applications > Wine > Programs > Microsoft Office and click the launcher for Word.  You may need to restart your machine in order for the Microsoft Office program group to appear in the menu.  When Word launches, you’ll need to activate as normal and, importantly, choose not to use Microsoft updates [screenshot] (see note below).

Notes: There are some limitations, the most noteworthy of which is that this may not work correctly if you install using media with an SP already applied, Office under Wine will not work with any of the Microsoft Service Packs and/or Microsoft Update.

The ‘proof is in the pudding’ as they say, heres some screenshots [Word Excel PowerPoint].  Enjoy!

If you find this guide useful, please leave a comment.

Adobe AIR is becoming increasingly popular amongst developers owning to its ability to work across multi-platforms, developers now only have to write the code once and it’ll work not only in Windows, but also Linux and Mac using the AIR platform.  The amount of AIR applications on the market is still somewhat limited, and most of the things available are niche items but at it grows in popularity, it also grows in its usefulness to the average end user.

I have a few applications which I use, meaning that I can run them both in Windows 7 and Ubuntu; it’s great being able to boot into either OS depending on my mood and not have to switch just to do the things that I need.

Probably the most well known AIR application that I use is TweetDeck; which for the record is really useful!  TweetDeck is a ‘one stop shop’ for your social networking requirements, giving you a single screen with access to all of your most needed information across Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.  You get full access to all of the native features with the exception of the new Twitter Lists feature, although this is already being addressed and will feature in a forthcoming update.  Obviously it focuses on Twitter and is great for composing tweets, giving you functionality including full bit.ly API integration and the ability to ‘shrink’ tweets on demand to fit 140 characters.

I also run PiWik Desktop Analytics.  You may not have heard of PiWik but they are an open source alternative to Google Analytics and actually, they are really rather good.  What is worth mentioning here, is that unlike Google Analytics, PiWik is installed locally onto your web server so you can be sure no one has access to your data, with privacy becoming more and more or an issue as the days go on, a lot are already questioning the way in which Google ‘could’ use your data, with PiWik this isn’t a concern.  Enough about PiWik for now, I will be writing a review of PiWik in the not too distant future.  PiWik Desktop Analytics is a great little app which runs in AIR and gives you real time access to your web statistics.  It even has a live tab showing you who is on your site right now.  Great stuff.

Installing Adobe AIR on Ubuntu is actually quite easy, although it is not available in the repository so simply follow these instructions:

• Download Adobe AIR by clicking this link, ensure that you save the installer to your desktop for the following steps
• Once the download has completed, you need to open your Terminal (select Applications > Accessories > Terminal).  Type the following command to switch to your desktop where you have just downloaded the AIR installer:
  cd ~/desktop
  We now need to make the file executable.  To do this type the following command:
  chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
  Finally you need to run the installer itself, as you are already in Terminal simply type the following command:
  ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
• The Adobe AIR installer will now launch, obviously click to agree the T&Cs and then sit back, the installer doesn’t take long.

That’s it.  Now all you need to do is go find some AIR applications to download and enjoy; I recommend that you check out TweetDeck..!

If you’re using or find any good AIR apps, leave a comment below and share your experiences.

At this stage I am assuming that you already have Sun VirtualBox installed and that you have gone through the process of installing a new virtual machine and installed the latest Ubuntu release.  It’s at this stage once you have started Ubuntu that you’ll be greeted with a low resolution screen, when you go to the display options you’ll find that you only get options to choose 800×600 or 640×400 which let’s face it, is not very helpful with modern screens.  Personally, I am running a 1920×1200 resolution so found the default virtual Ubuntu almost unworkable.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to overcome this; all you need to do is follow the following steps:

• Start your virtual box and log into Ubuntu in the normal way
• Hit the right ctrl key so that you can get you mouse pointer outside of the virtual box as you’ll now need to work with the host machine
• Go to the top of the virtual window, click on Devices and then select Install Guest Additions.  You’ll now see the virtual CDROM installed within Ubuntu and a new icon will appear on the desktop
• Click back inside the virtual box again and go to Applications, Accessories and then Terminal
• Type cd /media/cdrom0 and then hit enter
• Type sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run and then hit enter.  You should then see the following:

• You now need to reboot the virtual machine
• Log back into Ubuntu and go to System, Preferences then Display.  You should now have more options than the original low resolution options you had.

Depending on your specific hardware, you may still find that you’d like a different combination or higher resolution than the new ones which are listed; again, there is a solution:

• Open Terminal again by going to Applications, Accessories and Terminal
• Type sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and then hit enter.  You will be asked for your password, type this and hit enter again
• The text editor will now load, before changing anything make a backup by going to the file menu and choose save as, changing the file name to xorgbak.conf
• Now to make the changes.  Unlike previous versions you will not see a long list of configuration options, 9.10 creates these settings dynamically.  However you can still add specific combinations so add your desired settings here (Caveat: Working with xorg.conf is a topic in itself so do not add code here unless you are sure what you are doing, you WILL break the installation and either have to fix it from the command line or reinstall the virtual machine), this will vary depending on your hardware and the resolution you are trying to achieve.
• You must now do a save as but ensure you change the filename back to the original xorg.conf otherwise you will overwrite the backup you have just created.
• Restart the virtual box and you should now have the new screen resolutions!

Enjoy!