Running Microsoft Office 2003 on Fedora 7

Greetings,

Here I am back, with what I have learnt out of using my highly tuned Fedora 7 machine. I feel so excited today after trying out some really cool manoeuvres and getting positive results. Of course, Linux is fun to work with (especially when you have to resolve dependencies manually, browsing repositories, etc..well, I assume that you have a good bandwidth and no work to do:))

Open Office is good, but it is a fact that it isn’t as good as Microsoft Office 2003 (and the gap is wider for 2007). I’ve heard about the commercial Star Office but in my honest opinion, Microsoft Office still forges ahead in the list. Well, today, I managed to “complete” my modest Acer TravelMate 2350 running a 1.2Ghz Celeron Processor with only 256MB Ram. However, thanks to fedora’s powerful memory management, I was able to run my Opera Browser (with 10+ tabs open) together with Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word 2003 at the same time.

This is what I did: (Follow all the steps carefully, and you won’t have any problems!! – my bet)

Notice that Word, Excel and Powerpoint will work. I have tried MsAccess but that won’t launch because Access initialises some Database conenctions with system files which are inexistent in the Wine environment. In any case, Microsoft Access is useless, as well as Microsoft Outlook.

Step1:

Get wine-core-0.9.36-2.fc7.i386.rpm and install it:

rpm -ivh  wine-core-0.9.36-2.fc7.i386.rpm

Step2:

Configure Wine:

Applications>Wine>Wine Configuration (or winecfg in a Terminal).

Under Applications Tab in the Configuration Window, Choose ”Windows XP”

Under Libraries Tab,  add riched20 and riched32 from the “New override for library” drop-down list.

(If msxml3 isn’t in the list,don’t panic, you will see it later.):

You may wish to check the other Tabs (and check your audio and video settings- but these are not overly

important right now.)

Step3:

Download and Install  Microsoft XML Parser (MSXML):

msiexec /i msxml3.msi

Run the Wine Configuration and add msxml3 to the library list (check step2)

Step4:

Set the Owner and Organization of your Wine installation:

Applications>Wine> regedit (or regedit in a Terminal).

Modify Owner and Organization in:

[Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion]
[Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion]

Step5:

Mount your Office 2003 CD-Rom:

(The option -o unhide avoids having problems with hidden files during installation.)

su
mkdir /mnt/Office2003
mount -t iso9660 -o unhide /dev/cdrom /mnt/Office2003

Step6:
Start the Microsoft Office 2003 Professional setup (I hope you have your key-generator or serial.txt ready;))

cd /mnt/Office2003wine setup.exe

You should be done by now. (Post any comments if you experienced any difficulty- This article

fully supports Fedora 7 and RedHat users. I don’t usually talk about debian, especially Ubuntu because it simply won’t word on my machine- And Ubuntu has some serious unresolved graphics

issues.)

Step7:

Try opening Microsoft Word 2003:

cd /home/shailen/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Office/OFFICE11
wine WINWORD.EXE
wine EXCEL.EXE
wine POWERPNT.EXE

You may wish to create Fedora Launchers for these applications.

Hope that worked for someone..

By the way, I heard that some people have to Activate Office 2003. If you encounter this, I guess you know what you have to do..

By Shailen Sobhee,

Serving the Open-Source world, yet again..

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