Wine 2.0 Released, Lets You Run Microsoft Office 2013 on Linux

OMGUbuntu! ^ | 1/24/17 | Joey Sneddon

[markomalley]

A brand new stable release of Wine, the Windows compatibility programme, is now available to download.

Wine 2.0 — yes, 2.0 — follows more than a year of development effort and marks the start of a new timed-based release cadence.

Various miscellaneous changes make up Wine 2.0, ranging from support for Unicode 9.0; better HiDPI scaling; improved clipboard behaviour; an updated Gecko engine; and adjustments to joystick button mapping and force feedback effects.

For gamers Wine 2.0 implements, fixes and polishes a slew of Direct3D 10/11 features, including more shader instructions, sRGB read/write support, array textures and so on, plus there are tweaks to DirectX support.

On the audio side there’s GStreamer 1.0 support, DirectSound down-mixing to stereo.

Other highlights include support for Microsoft Office 2013, and the ability to run 64-bit applications on something called macOS, say the team in their announcement.

Install Wine 2.0 on Ubuntu

Wine 2.0 is available to download from WineHQ right now — but you’ll need to compile it by hand.

Chances are you (like me) are too lazy to do that. Instead, to install Wine 2.0 on Ubuntu you can make use of the official Wine builds PPA.

First run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wine/wine-builds

Once added to your software sources you can can upgrade or install the latest stable release using:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wine-staging

[Dalberg-Acton]

In terminal, type “whereis” followed by the name of the program.

[zeugma]

Re: systemback

Never heard of that one. I use backintime (runs daily via cron). I'll have to check out systemback though if I really need to recover off a catastrophic failure, I prefer to reinstall from scratch. At least it's not as painful as the primitive windows installer.

[zeugma]

"Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing.”
-- Kirkwood Smith character background babbling in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country”

Indeed. I have no desire to run anything in Wine. That's what virtual machines are for. It's an interesting technical achievement, but not really something I'd use.

[daniel1212]

In terminal, type “whereis” followed by the name of the program.

Thanks, I hope to try it next time. But isn't a right click with Properties a lot better?

[Bob434]

yeah it’s pretty easy to just reinstall linux- but i do have a lot of customizations and non software mgr programs i have to manually install that take me a couple of hours to install and tweak to my liking-

I was able to do a ‘current system live CD’ backup which was quite nice- Will save me a lot of work and customization work-

Would be nice if there was a way to do a complete disk backup of the dual boot disk- as i have loads of windows customizations and tweaks too0- and that one takes me days to do-

Check out youtube for some videos on systemback- I think you’ll like it-

[Alas Babylon!]

Of course, you’ll still need a license to run Office 2013—on any platform.

[zeugma]

Sounds pretty cool.

I started working with computers on HP-3000 minicomputers. I really loved the way they did backups on those systems. You did backup to tape (1200 BPI reels!). The backup program actually loaded all the boot and configuration information at the start of the first tape. To do a system reload, you booted off the tape, and told it to restore. No other media was required. Unfortunately, this was the only way to defrag a disk, or to level data out if you configured a new disk pack. Fortunately I didn't have to do that often, but I've always wanted a way to do something similar on my PC. On my HP-3000s, I had an average of 20 or so tapes per system, which was time consuming, but absolutely solid from a data restoration standpoint.

If I had a blueray writer (haven't made that jump yet), I'd probably have about the same amount of media. I know I could essentially do a 'dd' to get system images, but that is rather impractical on a day to day basis.

These days, I do my best to keep a list of every program I install that's in addition to the base load, so it's a matter of executing a script to get the programs back, but I still have to look to my backups for deltas of stuff in /etc that I've modified. Backintime does a great job of backing up user data though. Restoring all of /home is painless, and I end up with my desktop exactly the way I had it before the restore. That's one of the really cool things about unix in general IMO. I've never had a successful restore on a windows system anywhere close to the degree I get, because so much stuff is hidden in the registry, and doing registry restores is problematic at best.

[Bob434]

[[I’ve never had a successful restore on a windows system anywhere close to the degree]]

System restore on windows sucked- I began with a program called Go-Back- it was pretty good- didn’t matter if a virus or trojan or whatever hit, or if i royally messed up the computer- just did a goback and was back up and running- all programs and customizations etc intack- then they were bought by another company- and the new one was terrible, so i went with rollBackRX- Excellent program- Can keep as many snapshots as you want (Goback could only keep a certain amount)- and also worked at boot level if you wanted so that if your computer got so messed up it refused to start- the boot menu would revert to before the problem happened- I had snapshots a couple of years old- just to have icnase computer got really messed up and registry got hosed too bad- Rollback takes care of registry too- it is a complete system disk snapshot- copies everything- and it’s relatively quick too- a couple of minutes- It’s only about $50- well worth the price-

I switched to linux a year or so ago- and wanted something similar- Systemback was about the closest- but it’s not as good as RollBackRX (no boot menu rescue) But you can do a current system live CD which essentially is like a boot system rescue- probably even better as RollBackRX snapshots do have a potential of becoming corrupted (I never had it happen, but it’s possible) But like i mentioned, creating the Live CD isn’t very intuitive- but there are some tutorials online-

One thing i learned with these programs is, anytime you try a new program or software, or test something on your computer, it’s always good to do a snapshot first- that was if something goes wrong, you can go back to immediately before installing the new software- if the new software works, just delete that snapshot- Although I confess to forgetting to do this a lot and have to use an earlier snapshot and I lose any recent changes i made to computer-

[Dalberg-Acton]

It is easier but comes with too much baggage. Namely Windows.

[cynwoody]

I don’t suppose my little Rasberry PI would be a good candidate for testing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdo15G0Jlng

If the Raspberry Pi can run Chrome, I expect it can run Office/Wine, too. Chrome is an even bigger memory hog than Office.

[cynwoody]

I started working with computers on HP-3000 minicomputers.

Yeah, what fun it was to code in SPL! The 3000 had a stack-based architecture, reminiscent of the Burroughs mainframes of the sixties and seventies.

According to the Wikipedia, versions of the 3000 are still in use. And I see Bob Green of Qedit fame is still at it.

[zeugma]

You don't run into folk that even know what the HP-3000 was very often. I still have a copy of Eugene Volokh's "Burn Before Reading". The 3K had a really weird way of organizing files that was completely different from the Unix way of doing things. There is a company out there that has written a port for the RISC-based version of MPE that will run in VMWare. It's pretty neat to boot up the VM and see a ":" prompt. Until fairly recently there was a system out there that had a telnet server running on it where you could login and play Warp. I'd like to find an old Model 70 somewhere to heat my house during the winter. (grin)

Regarding Bob Green, it's amazing they can still keep that going since MPE has been dead for more than a decade now. They certainly have a niche. Hope it's keeping the lights on.

[cynwoody]

I still have a copy of Eugene Volokh's "Burn Before Reading".

I have a dim recollection of Volokh from attending an HP conference or two. His paper is still online (at Alfredo Rego's site), and I think I recall reading it at the time. He was just a kid at the time.

It turns out the same Eugene Volokh is now a law professor at UCLA and runs a libertarianish blog called the Volokh Conspiracy. He is an immigrant from Ukraine. His father Vladimir was a programmer and taught young Eugene. He learned fast. More here.

[daniel1212]

It is easier but comes with too much baggage. Namely Windows.

There is more, but for me it is faster and more useful, due to the ease of use and customization (since i cannot do coding) etc., and i have used ever major and some minor Linux distros (but only Xubuntu on an old laptop now). But i am glad to see an alternative to MS.

[zeugma]

It turns out the same Eugene Volokh is now a law professor at UCLA and runs a libertarianish blog called the Volokh Conspiracy. He is an immigrant from Ukraine. His father Vladimir was a programmer and taught young Eugene. He learned fast. More here.

Funny. I figured there couldn't be that many Eugene Volokhs in the world. Wasn't sure it was the same guy though.

Btw, I'm using your Posting Form Enhancer and FrTreeviewer Greasemonkey scripts. They rock. One thing I'd change about the posting script, is to make the <p> work like the bold and italics tag in that it would close the </p>

[zeugma]

Re: PostingEnhancer

I managed to get it working the way I wanted myself.
added:
addButton('P', 'p', 'paragraphs', 'p');
commented:
// addButton('P', wrap(addOnOwnLine, '

'),
// 'Adds a

tag at the cursor.', 'enter');

Now, if only I could figure out how to insert a "<br>" by pressing shift-enter, it would be mostly perfect!