[Wine] Re: Microsoft Office 2003 Pro for several users

[hellork]

fdelente wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I'm using Windows XP clients in a local network that is connected to a central server running Debian Linux.
> 
> I'd like to switch the clients to Ubuntu, as my users use OpenOffice and Firefox mainly; however, some of them still use Office 2003/Office 2007 (especially Word and Excel).
> 
> For now I have only tinkered with Office 2003, I'll see about 2007 later.
> 
> On my server I have a directory where an administrative install of Office 2003 resides. I managed in doing the installation on a client, as root; I used /opt/wine/drive_c as my wine C: drive, so that every person logging on the client can access it.
> 
> However, when I run Word as a user (not as root), I get a message that "Office has not been installed for that user". I tried copying system.reg, user.reg and userdef.reg over to the ~/.wine of the user, but it still gives the same error.
> 
> Anybody has suggestions and (possibly :)) solutions?
> 
> Thanks.

This setup has several problems. Running wine as root is not recommended. Sudo is worse as it creates a permissions nightmare.
http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-96bebfa287b4288974de0df23351f278b0d41014

You might be able to get multiple users running from /opt but I don't believe it is supported.

But since I'm not support... I can offer some hypothetical "solutions" to this unsupported situation.

This is not advised, and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't work or breaks things, but you could fiddle around with sed and maybe change 'root' to something else in the user's registry files, but this won't be supported either. e.g.
sed -i 's/root/SomeUserName/g' some_files.reg #sed -i... dangerous incantation

Of course this might be done as the user him(her)self purely for novelty/entertainment purposes, after fixing the aforementioned permission problems. :?