[plug] vmware, wine, boch, win4lin ...

[Peter Wright]

Hi Bill,

On Tue, Nov 07, 2000 at 08:08:16PM +0800, BillK wrote:
> I have just received a message from vmware saying they are discontinuing
[ snip stuff about alternatives for running windows programs ]
> wine is a possibility, I have seen a number of people on various lists
> saying they have MSoffice installed, but the few attempts I have made so
> far stop quite early - has anyone at plug succeeded?

I've been playing recently with Wine, though I must acknowledge that it
isn't with the intent of running something useful like MS Office. No, I've
been trying to get Half-Life running (unfortunately not successfully as
yet...) :-(

However, I'd been intending to have a go with MS Office and see if I could
get it running with Wine. Using Wine-20001026, for reference (built from
source). I'm using Office 2000 here, so I wouldn't necessarily extrapolate
any results from there to Office 97 (97 will probably be more reliable),
but it should provide some indicator.

Anyway, just using the general form

$ cd /mnt/win/c/Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Office/

(or into your appropriate directory)

$ wine winword.exe
$ wine excel.exe
$ wine msaccess.exe
$ wine frontpg.exe
$ wine powerpnt.exe
$ wine photodrw.exe
$ wine outlook.exe

produced the following general results...

On startup, Word, Excel and Access popped up with an error dialog alerting
me to the critical error that the Tahoma font was not present. Oh well. :)
Generally, when the apps ran, there were quite a few minor graphical and
font glitches (as I believe tends to happen a fair bit with apps run
through Wine), but only one that was close to a real problem (a
yes/no/cancel dialog box that popped up when I tried to exit Excel, asking
me if I wanted to save changes - unfortunately, the dialog window was so
"glitched" I could barely make out which button was which :).

Aside from that... Word 2000 was a bit random. Sometimes it froze and
"deadlocked" on startup, sometimes it ran for a little while before locking
up. Basically, it didn't work, but it wasn't entirely predictable.

Excel worked well. I actually have a few spreadsheets converted to Excel 97
format from their original StarCalc format, so I was able to open a few and
play with them. Excel seemed to be quite happy.

Access and Powerpoint both managed to get to their initial window display
screen, then both froze at a point where they were asking what template you
would like to start with. That was it for both of them, I couldn't get any
further.

Frontpage "seemed" fine. However, I've never used it before, so couldn't
really test it. It didn't lock up as Word, Access and Powerpoint did
though.

Likewise with PhotoDraw, it seemed to be okay. Never used it before, but I
played with it a little bit and it didn't crash.

Finally, Outlook 2000 .... it got into the setup wizard, I tried to get it
to set up for internet email only - it died soon after that.

> BillK

Hope that gives you an idea of what the current Wine support of MSOffice
(2000, at least) is like. The trickiest bit of getting Wine working is
usually getting your Wine configuration tuned to your machine. I'm
certainly no expert with that, but let me know if you need any help and
I'll try to give you a hand :).


Pete.
-- 
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~pete/

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