Installing Office 2007 on Ubuntu

Here is a little script that I put together that installs Office 2007 for me.

Now, this script makes the following assumptions:

• I already have a directory created called wine in my home directory.
• I want Office installed in a separate directory/wineprefix
• I have the Office CD mounted already at /media/cdrom0
• I have winetricks in my path (which winetricks = /usr/local/bin/winetricks)

Also, just for information, here is my setup

• Ubuntu 8.10
• Wine version 1.1.16
• I believe I installed Wine with apt-get using the repository at http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt

export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/wine/office2007

mkdir $WINEPREFIX
winetricks msxml3 dotnet20 gdiplus riched20 riched30 vcrun2005sp1 allfonts ie6
winetricks vista
wine /media/cdrom0/setup.exe
winetricks winxp

I hope it helps.

PDF to Document Conversion

I have been looking for a way to convert a PDF to either a Word Document or an Open Office document.  Basically, I have some instructions for installing software delivered as a PDF with the software from the vendor.  I would like to be able to convert that document to something I can edit and add my notes to it as I install.  Currently, I just handwrite the notes on the printed copy of the instructions.  If I could convert it to Word or Open Office, the end result would be searchable and I could add screenshots.

I found a great link that will convert documents online:

http://www.convertpdftoword.net/

This worked for a small document, but my instructions document did not work.  I am assuming that it is because it was too large.

I found a plugin that says it can import PDFs for Open Office 3.0.  I haven’t tried it yet.  I will try to do that and report back.

A while back, I found that importing PDFs was on the ToDo list.

News: Open Office 3.0 is Out

I just saw an article from LXF saying that Open Office 3.0 is ready for download.  I installed it, but I haven’t used it enough to really comment on it yet.

The download was pretty easy.  I downloaded the zip file, uncompressed it, and then I used dpkg -i to install all of the deb files.  They installed into the /opt directory, which was great because now I can have both versions.

New Beta Releases of Fedora and Ubuntu

Linux Format Magazine pointed out that Fedora has released a beta of Fedora 9 and Ubuntu has released Ubuntu 8.04.

These features caught my eye from the Fedora 9 Feature List:

• Firefox 3
• Update X Server
• Randr Support — hopefully, this should make plugging and unplugging my laptop into my monitor easier
• Fast X Start time — will my laptop boot faster?

They also pointed out that Open Office 2.4 has been released!   Will it be in Fedora 9?

Open Office 3.0

I just found this article from LXF about Open Office 3.0. It sounds very exciting — I can’t wait for it to come out. Here are they links they pointed out:

• OpenOffice.org 3.0’s new features, an early look
• Performance Improvements List

The presenter screen feature is one feature that I am really interested in:

• Presenter Screen by Andre Fischer
• Presenter Screen wiki
• Presenter Screen implementation
• Developer Snapshot (has instructions for trying it)