Mike Southby

As promised, an update on where I am at with trying to get a working installation of Microsoft Office 2010 on Ubuntu.

After numerous hours spent trying various options and configurations of WINE I’m still unable to get it working.  Sure, I can get it to install but it won’t run so I can’t really call it a success.  I’ll have some time over the Christmas break so will keep trying and hopefully will have a stable solution soon; these things have a habit of ‘falling into place’ and the answer is usually staring me in the face!

My original post showing how to install Office 2007 can be found here – http://www.mikesouthby.co.uk/2009/11/ubuntu-9-10-installing-microsoft-office-2007

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.

There have been a lot of reports recently by numerous people around the internet, that there seems to be ongoing problems with people syncing their iPhone to iTunes in a Windows 7 environment.  The official Apple forums [Link] have got a number of threads related to the issue so it does appear that this is definitely a problem and this is not just a bunch of die hard Apple fans trying to add a negative taste to what has been otherwise, a successful launch for Microsoft’s latest operating system.

Now, looking at the problems people are facing, there does seem to be some common similarities; most people who are reporting the problem are using a motherboard with an Intel P55 chipset and the problem seems to be affecting more people using Windows 7 x64.  Both of these are not conclusive though, as it is also affecting people using other chipsets and Windows 7 x86, although certainly, less so.

The official advice – as always – seems to be a workaround, suggesting that you should use a USB hub or PCI USB card for connecting your iPhone, and disabling Power Management for each of the USB root hubs on your machine, but none of these seem to work universally for everyone which to me would suggest that neither Apple or Microsoft still really understand what the problem is and that there isn’t an imminent fix.

Fortunately, I don’t have an iPhone so am not affected by this, how about you?  Have you had problems with iPhone/iTunes syncing with Windows 7?  If so, have you been able to fix it or come up with a workaround?  Share your thoughts!

If you’ve arrived at my blog using Internet Explorer 6, you’ll find that some of the features do not work as they should and the blog doesn’t always display correctly.  You’ll still be able to view my posts which of course is the most important thing (well, I’d like to think so…), but you’re overall experience may not be as good as it could be.  You’ll also receive a notice to consider upgrading to a new browser.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001. In its day it was a decent enough browser but in 2009 its time is fast coming to an end, a decade is a long time in the IT world and things have moved on.  As any developer or coder will tell you, working with IE6 is one of the most difficult and frustrating things to deal with on a day to day basis; it takes up a disproportionate amount of their time.  Aside from that, IE6’s support for modern web standards is very lacking, restricting what developers can create and in essence, holding them back from making the web a better, more interactive place.

So whilst not mandatory, I strongly urge you to upgrade your browser,  my personal favourite is Firefox, you’ll find the web will look a much nicer place…

There seems to be a lot of confusion over the new naming convention for Windows 7.  Microsoft in all their wisdom seem to change direction each time a new version of Windows is released and each time, the name doesn’t seem to follow the previous.  So, I thought I’d explain the logic behind why the latest version is called Windows 7.

Microsoft has decided to start calling this and future releases of their Windows operating system based on their version numbers.  Versions previously known by other numbers (95 and 98) or name (Me, XP and Vista) used internal version numbers.  XP was version 5.1 and Vista was version 6.0 for example.

So the story in the evolution of Windows so far is:

Windows 1 was released in November 1985, 2.0 in October 1987, and 2.1 (which was also known as Windows /286 and Windows /386) in May 1998.

Windows 3, which first introduced 32-bit capabilities came to market in May 1990, and came into its own with versions 3.1 in April 1992.

Microsoft then split off a ‘new technology’ version of Windows to compete with UNIX.  It was influenced by Microsoft’s then partnership with IBM who created OS/2.  The development of this new version began as OS/2 version 3.  It shipped as Windows NT 3.1 in July 1993 and was a fully 32-bit operating system.  It was also the first version of Windows that did not run as a shell on top of DOS.  Windows NT 3.5 shipped in 1994, and 4.0 in 1996.

Windows 4 came out as Windows 95 in August 1995 and was the first consumer version with 32-bit support and pre-emptive multitasking.  Windows 98 arrived in July 1998, and a second edition (Windows 98 SE) replaced it in 1999.  Windows Me shipped in September 2000 and was the final consumer version of Windows 4; it was also a complete flop.

Windows 5 arrived as Windows 2000 in February 2000 and was a replacement for NT 4.0.  The consumer version, known as Windows XP (or Windows 5.1), was released to manufacturers in August 2001 although not available on the retail market until October.  The latest version is SP3.  Windows Server 2003 (Windows 5.2) replaced Windows 2000 in April 2003, and its latest version is SP2.  Microsoft released separate 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Sever 2003 in April 2005.

Windows 6 was named Windows Vista, released to manufacturers in November 2006 and reached the retail market in January 2007.  Vista is also available in 64-bit editions.  Windows Server 2008 is also another version of Windows 6.

So there we have it the story so far and today, we see the official launch of the 7^th incarnation of the Windows family – Windows 7.

Makes perfect sense really doesn’t it?