I want to run MS Office on Ubuntu and have found messages saying you can do it with Wine, but I don't know what Wine is.
Ubuntu – Wine. Is it part of Ubuntu
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I installed office 2013 and I used to get a black window after starting it up. I fixed the black screen by following the solution posted in the WineHQ-Forum.
Here's what I did:
Install Wine and Components
First, install wine 2.1 (might als work with 2.0 'winehq-staging')
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wine/wine-builds
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-devel
Install 'winbind'
sudo apt install winbind
Create Clean 32bit Prefix for Win7
Crete a clean 32 bit prefix and start up winecfg:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/Office2013 WINEARCH=win32 winecfg
In the winecfg applications tab select "Windows version: Windows 7" Close wine config and install winetricks
Install Libraries
sudo apt install winetricks
Then start winetricks for your prefix
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/Office2013 WINEARCH=win32 winetricks
accept "select the default wineprefix" with OK. Now, select "Install Windows DLL components" and go and install msxml6
I also installed the cambria font, but that shouldn't matter.
Don't close winetricks just yet, you most likely want to fix the black screen bug.
Fix Black Window
In order to fix the black window that impedes Office 13 to be used, add the HKCU\Software\Wine\Direct3D\MaxVersionGL new DWORD value 30002 (hexa) to the registry.
Here's how to do this: In Winetricks select Run regedit and wait for the Registry Editor window to open. In the folder tree expand HKEY_CURRENT_USER - Software - Wine and create a new key in the Wine folder. To do so, right click, select new-->key and name it Direct3D. Now create new-->DWORD Value, rename the file to MaxVersionGL and set the value data to 30002 (hexadecimal). Close the Registry Editor window.
It should look like this:
Close the Registry Editor window.
Close the winetricks window and run installer:
Install Office 2013
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/Office2013 WINEARCH=win32 wine ~/PathTo/Office2013Setup.x86.exe
From here, the install runs and completes 100%.
Open one of the Office programs of your choice. They mostly work, but I found that the Word Math Typesetting does not work and Power Point may not start as well due to "not enough memory or system resources". So, still room for improvement.
Best Answer
Yes, that is exactly correct.
Most people assume it's an emulation layer but it's more of an interpreter, managing where Windows would normally provide resources and mapping that to Ubuntu. Of course there are situations where Ubuntu (and its drivers) don't or can't provide the same resources (like the various Direct3D pipelines) so in cases like those you can often see overhead from the translation process.
The biggest case of this is converting Direct3D into OpenGL. It's a process that is very sensitive to latency. This is undergoing huge work right at the moment (the "CSMT patches") to multi-thread the OpenGL translation and command streams. IMO it's getting close to native speed.
But if you're using a Windows OpenGL application, it's possible you'll see native-like performance.
The big outstanding issues in Wine come mostly from needing to reimplement libraries. For gamers this is mostly latest DirectX stuff (DX10 and 11 aren't implemented yet) but there are all sorts of applications that can exhibit strange corner-case bugs.