Microsoft Office 2003 Pro for several users

[fdelente]

Hello.

I'm using Windows XP clients in a local network that is connected to a central server running Debian Linux.

I'd like to switch the clients to Ubuntu, as my users use OpenOffice and Firefox mainly; however, some of them still use Office 2003/Office 2007 (especially Word and Excel).

For now I have only tinkered with Office 2003, I'll see about 2007 later.

On my server I have a directory where an administrative install of Office 2003 resides. I managed in doing the installation on a client, as root; I used /opt/wine/drive_c as my wine C: drive, so that every person logging on the client can access it.

However, when I run Word as a user (not as root), I get a message that "Office has not been installed for that user". I tried copying system.reg, user.reg and userdef.reg over to the ~/.wine of the user, but it still gives the same error.

Anybody has suggestions and (possibly ) solutions?

Thanks.

[hellork]

Hello.

I'm using Windows XP clients in a local network that is connected to a central server running Debian Linux.

I'd like to switch the clients to Ubuntu, as my users use OpenOffice and Firefox mainly; however, some of them still use Office 2003/Office 2007 (especially Word and Excel).

For now I have only tinkered with Office 2003, I'll see about 2007 later.

On my server I have a directory where an administrative install of Office 2003 resides. I managed in doing the installation on a client, as root; I used /opt/wine/drive_c as my wine C: drive, so that every person logging on the client can access it.

However, when I run Word as a user (not as root), I get a message that "Office has not been installed for that user". I tried copying system.reg, user.reg and userdef.reg over to the ~/.wine of the user, but it still gives the same error.

Anybody has suggestions and (possibly ) solutions?

Thanks.

This setup has several problems. Running wine as root is not recommended. Sudo is worse as it creates a permissions nightmare.
http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-96bebfa ... 78b0d41014

You might be able to get multiple users running from /opt but I don't believe it is supported.

But since I'm not support... I can offer some hypothetical "solutions" to this unsupported situation.

This is not advised, and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't work or breaks things, but you could fiddle around with sed and maybe change 'root' to something else in the user's registry files, but this won't be supported either. e.g.
sed -i 's/root/SomeUserName/g' some_files.reg #sed -i... dangerous incantation

Of course this might be done as the user him(her)self purely for novelty/entertainment purposes, after fixing the aforementioned permission problems.

[fdelente]

Thanks for your answer.

It's obvious that it's only a registry problem, since Word starts ok when I am a user; it only complains about not being registered to this user.

I looked into the *reg file, but it seems the user info is encoded by Word when it installs :^(

What bugs me is that it works ok on Windows, so there is a mechanism in the registry that allows the user to use a program that was installed by the super-user, and this mechanism is still not implemented in wine(?).

[vitamin]

What bugs me is that it works ok on Windows

Because it shares stuff between users. Wine doesn't.

The only way you can do what you want to do is to copy the entire content of WINEPREFIX (default ~/.wine) to each user. You may share some binary files if you want to save space. But you have to have separate registry and WINEPREFIX for each user.

[fdelente]

Yes, I know that every user has to have his registry; however, when I install Word in Windows, some keys must be created in the registry that allow every user to use Word without having installed it himself.

Symlinking to binaries and/or data files after that is no issue.

[Gert van den Berg]

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 08:00, fdelente <[email protected]> wrote:

Yes, I know that every user has to have his registry; however, when I install Word in Windows, some keys must be created in the registry that allow every user to use Word without having installed it himself.

In Windows HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE is shared and needs administrator access
to modify, while HKEY_CURRENT_USER can be modified by the user and
each user has its own copy.

In Wine the entire registry is kept in the Wine-prefix and can only be
accessed by one user. This eliminates the need for root access which
wouod have made Wine a huge security issue and it is probably easier
to implement...

Gert

[dimesio]

Yes, I know that every user has to have his registry; however, when I install Word in Windows, some keys must be created in the registry that allow every user to use Word without having installed it himself.

So figure out which keys those are and edit them.