Can not install Excel97/Word97

[Fredrik Persson]

Hello!

I am new to this list (although I have done a fair amount of research in the archives) and I need to ask what is probably one of the most frequently asked questions on a list like this:

How do I install Word97 and Excel97?

(Codeweavers CrossoverOffice can do this, and they ASSURE us that they roll everything they do back to the main wine CVS and hence, this SHOULD work!)

So far; this is what I've done:

Debian (testing) distribution, running the debian-packaged version of wine, which seems to be "Wine 20020605". (At least that's what "wine --version" gives.) It runs notepad.exe fine. Save doesn't work, though.

I don't have a Windows partition, nor do I have access to a Windows computer. (Well, I DO but I wanted to do this the "clean" way, ie. wine/Linux only with no MS contamination, sort of. You know what I mean.)

In goes the Office CD. I mount it with "mount -t iso9660 -o unhide /dev/cdrom /cdrom" (the "unhide" thing was a trick I read about in some other post, I don't think it made much difference though).

Then...

"wine /cdrom/excel/disk1/install.exe"

... which gives me this:

"err:module:PE_fixup_imports Module (file) MSSETUP.dll (which is needed by X:\~MSSETUP.T\~msstfof.t\acmsetup.exe) not found"

Right. MSSETUP.dll I find on dll-files.com, and put it in my fake-windows WINDOWS/SYSTEM directory. (X: is my /tmp, btw.)

That brings me a bit further. The program starts and a windows error message appears, stating that it cannot open "C:\Windows\System\Excel97.stf". Pity, I think, since the file exists in /cdrom/excel/disk1 and so I drop that, too, into the Windows/System dir in my fake-windows environment. 

Now I get an error message (a windows error message) that I don't know what to do with. It says:

"Setup Error 797

Inf Parser Object

Your setup files may be damaged. Try restarting the Setup program from where you originally ran it."

I click OK and get another error message that claims "cannot read the first section of C:\Windows\System\Excel97.stf". 

Then I get the message that the installation was not finished, and the installation program exits.

I'd love to give you the complete texts of all the error messages, but those not quoted here are in swedish and I doubt that those would be of much help.

So... begging on my bare knees for help... what can I do? What am I doing wrong? How does Codeweavers do it in the CrossoverOffice?

I'm very, very grateful for any help. Surely, someone MUST have solved this problem, right? I mean, these applications must be the most tested ones in the history of Wine?

Ok, over and out. Thank you for reading this thing all the way to the end.

/Fredrik Persson