Wine Runs Word 2000 And Excel 2000

LLurex writes: "There's a short comment and screenshot on Ian Schmidt's Wine Page about everyone's favourite Windoze Emulator finally running Excel2000 and Word2000 (imho the only really good applications Microsoft ever published)! No more lame excuses, time to switch OS ..." The screenshot of Excel looks pretty much, well, like a screenshot of Excel. With this, two of the most persistent reasons not to run Linux appear to be fading; of course, what's to stop Microsoft from releasing versions that won't work under Wine, ever? That could be a good reason to stick with GNUmeric and pico.

Comments

Re:It could NEVER happen

[Ian Schmidt]

Oh my Jesus, I've been Slashdotted. :-)

Now then, lemme trot out my standard response to this claim, usually made by embittered former OS/2 users.

Microsoft does not control their own platform anymore. Their installed base is spread across 5+ Win32 implementations, including 95/95OSR2/98/98SE/NT351/NT4/2000. Office *has to* run on every single one of those, because many home and business customers don't upgrade their OS much if ever. This plays right into Wine's hands, since Office cannot use any new whizbang features on new MS OSes. They are being slowly strangled to death by their very own market share - it's a beautiful thing, and it goes along with ESR's arguments about DOJ being fun but unnecessary.

Wrong. MS Access :-).

[Christopher B. Brown]

MS Project may be the bee's knees for managerial types, but for "departmental applications," the close third to MS Word and MS Excel is the database application.

And just as the Classic Failed Project is the one that tries to develop a word processor to compete with Word, the widely useful thing that few have really seriously tried to do is to construct a "multiplexing data access tool" like MS Access.

Access may suck bad as a data repository, and MySQL and PostgreSQL may have it well-beat in that arena. But you can use Access with those DBMSes, thus obviating that demerit. What they don't offer, and nothing else does, either, is a tool that provides pretty/flexible ways of:

• Building queries using QBE (Query By Example);
• Screen Forms (not entirely unlike HTML Forms);
• Reports;
• The code that hides between Forms, Queries, and Reports...

Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

• Will Wine properly display the BSOD?
• Will patches to Wine be released as Service Packs, months after problems have been found and characterized?
• Will Wine reduce my system uptime to something more expected (like 2 or 3 days)?
• Will Wine redefine standard acronyms, like SMTP = Simple Microsoft Tunneling Protocol, DNS = Digital Nervous System, etc.
• Will Wine use illegal tactics to pressure vendors to not display other companies' Wine-equivalents?
• Will Wine ask "where do you want to go today?"
• Will Wine ship with a EULA inside a shrinkwrapped package?

Windows can do remote login with a GPL tool

[yerricde]

Not to mention an OS where you can log in remotely and its like your in front of the machine without a hideous lag of 'move mouse'...'wait for screen to catch up'...'click on icon'...'wait for screen to repaint new window'...'move mouse'...

Remote graphical login is now in the hands of lowly Windows 9x users with Back Orifice 2000, released by CDC under GNU GPL. If Back Orifice 2000 is a digital crime tool, then so is PCAnywhere.

Getting programs to run under WINE

[hey!]

It's been a year or so since I ugpraded, but I've been running Win32 Lotus Notes on it and it's pretty usable with the occaisional crash -- not enough that I'm checking the updates page on a regular basis, you see.

One problem I've found with getting programs to run under WINE is you have to raid a windows box's system directory to snitch the DLLs you need (e.g. the DLLs OLE subsystem). That's not exactly fair game.

I'd be very interested to know if they got Office to run under WINE with no MS intellectual property other than what might be copied to the hard disk by the Office 2K installer.

Re:Stability?

[sulli]

Can we run Excel2k and be 99% sure that it won't crash on us?

Well, you can't on Windows...

Re:the reasons aren't fading...

[knitfoo]

I think it's going to be sooner than you think.
Part of the Wine 1.0 effort now underway is to dramatically improve the end user experience of Wine.

For example, there is now an easy to use configurator for the .winerc file. While it's not committed to CVS (yet), you can download winecfg here.

We're working on getting most installers working under Wine; for a lot of installers, you can do the following:

1. wine setupxxx.exe (answer the questions)
2. Click on the icon on your desktop
   (assuming the app installed an icon to the desktop).
3. app runs.

4. You can see more of the overall Wine 1.0 status at http:/wine.codeweavers.com/status.shtml

Options

[SomeOtherGuy]

Yes- I admit I paid up for VMware...However it was worth a couple of hundred bucks to not have to worry about "what version of CVS wine do I need to run what version of this office suite OR when can wine support this tax manager OR what parts of this program work and what parts do not work". At least with VMware I can keep all of those nasty .dll's in their own "jail" (along with the rest of Windows) that appears as nothing more than a single file (big file) to the rest of Linux. I do not have to worry about paths or weirds filename~. It was worth it. And for anyone that needs Quicken, Excel, Photoshop, Dreamweaver or any other M$centric app -- just bite the bullet. (And for all those people that say VMware sucks because it is not Open Source or Free, etc, etc....Are you using Wine to run Open Source or Free programs??? -- That line gets crossed one way or the other -- I choose the easiest and most efficient thank you.