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I have succesfully installed office 2007 using Wine under 1 account on my parents computer (which now runs on linux mint 13 LTS XFCE). I installed it under 1 account and normally, when you do this in windows, it is installed for all accounts.

But because I have installed it under Linux using Wine, this does not apply to this situation.

therefore, my question is: (How) can I make office 2007 also available for the other user? I guess activating for the 2nd time (which is needed after install) will not work.

Can I install it on another drive besides the win c drive and have it shared this way? Can I also create a shortcut in the wine 'start' menu under 'programs'?

edit: I have successfully followed the tutorial provided by @slm. Each user now has msword available, although it has been installed only once using wine.

I have created a starter (for ms word) which uses this starting command:

sudo -u windows -H wine "C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Office12\\winword.exe"

And I have placed this starter in the 'office' section of the mint menu by adding the starter in the applications directory. I have edited the starter in my default editor (either gedit or leafpad):

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Microsoft Word
Comment=
Exec=sudo -u windows -H wine "C:\\\\Program Files\\\\Microsoft Office\\\\Office12\\\\winword.exe"\n
Icon=/media/Schijf-2/MS-Word-2-icon.png
Path=
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=false
Categories=Office

It is now perfectly listed under 'Kantoor'(which is Dutch for Office).

The only thing I have not succeeded in was having all word documents open with ms word. Perhaps I will try to do that in the future. Only setting .doc and .docx files to open with ms word was enough for me at this moment.

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2 Answers 2

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I think what you're really looking for is this Q&A from the Wine HQ forums titled: [FAQ] [RFC] How can multiple users share an installed Wine application.

=== How can multiple users share an installed Wine application? ===

Wine is a per-user app; every user has their own Wine Registry, with the list of installed apps for that user.

So one user installing App A is not going to tell the Wine Registry of any other user that App A is installed. The other user will have to install the application as well. [1]

So this scenario is not officially supported. There are some solutions written down on the WWW as for example for Ubuntu [2].

The gist of the Ubuntu Forums method mentioned in the 2nd links above, basically makes use of sudo to have the users run wine as a common user vs. each having their own installation. This would seem to be the most direct route, you'd need to follow the steps in the link, moving the previously setup Wine install + Office 2007 to a 3rd user account, windows.

Any user wanting to run Wine would then do this:

$ sudo -u windows -H wine notepad

Commands such as this above could be aliased for your parents accounts and even added to their LinuxMint menus for easier access.

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  • great! I'm gonna read the FAQ and I certainly want to have the system like you wrote in your last line(s). So that my parents only have to execute office from the mint menu (Can I also have it added to the 'office' section of the mint 'start' menu?)
    – DutchArjo
    Apr 22, 2014 at 18:20
  • 1
    @DutchArjo - sure you can add launch items to the menu's for this. If this A solves your Q please be sure to mark it as accepted so other's know your issues been resolved.
    – slm ♦
    Apr 22, 2014 at 20:55
  • one more question: When I have done accordingly to what is written above: Can I make documents automatically open in Microsoft Word? (make microsoft word (or any other microsoft program: excel, powerpoint) the standard application)
    – DutchArjo
    Oct 10, 2014 at 20:08
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    @DutchArjo - yes, you just need to designate that the mime-type for those documents should invoke wine word.exe $@ or some such line like that.
    – slm ♦
    Oct 10, 2014 at 20:20
  • great! I will spend some time figuring this out.
    – DutchArjo
    Oct 10, 2014 at 20:26
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everything you install in wine is installed in the .wine folder in your home folder, so changing the permission of this folder and making a symlink from the second user's .wine folder to the shared .wine folder should do the trick. try this code, let me know if it works, I didn't test it myself yet and it could be it needs some adjusting.

chown -R <user>:wheel /home/<user>/.wine
umask 002
chmod -R g+s /home/<user>/.wine
ln -s /home/<user>/.wine /home/<user2>/.wine
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  • thanks for your contribution. I already spend to many hours on configuring my parents computer. I will not be trying you suggestion on their computer. Perhaps I will try this anytime soon on my own computer. If so, I will post it this works!
    – DutchArjo
    Nov 27, 2014 at 10:44
  • Ok let me know, the advantage of this method over the above is file permissions and file owners that will stay from the user and not from the windows user + your starter will work.
    – switch87
    Nov 27, 2014 at 11:08
  • ok. my starter also works now...
    – DutchArjo
    Nov 27, 2014 at 11:15
  • For every user I mean, without sudo
    – switch87
    Nov 27, 2014 at 11:18
  • Alternatively, just copy that configuration directory instead of symlinking it - this would be closest to the behaviour you have on windows too, since office settings (apart from licensing and update) will be per-user.
    – rackandboneman
    Nov 27, 2015 at 21:43

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