From a CD, I installed Microsoft Office 2007 under Wine, so that my wife could edit her Microsoft Publisher files on an Ubuntu Linux system. I also installed Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. All three seemed to be working OK when I checked them after the installation completed. I was able to open the programs from the File Explorer by issuing the command wine explorer from a shell prompt in a Terminal window and then navigating to the directory, C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12, where the applications were located. I could also start Publisher by issuing the command below in a Terminal window:

wine "/home/alice@Wonderland/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Office/Office12/MSPUB.EXE"

To make it easer for my wife to open Publisher, though, I created a shortcut on her Ubuntu desktop. To create a shortcut you can take the following steps:

Open a Terminal window and create a new .desktop file on your desktop. You can use the nano editor or another text editor to create the file. E.g., nano ~/Desktop/AppName.desktop.

You then need to have lines like the following ones in the file:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Name of Your Application
Exec=wine "/home/username/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/AppName/app.exe"
Type=Application
Icon=wine
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=true

You need to use the absolute path the the .exe file for the program and, if the directory path contains a space, you must enclose the path within quotes. Also, you need to replace username with your username on the system. For Publisher, I could use the following lines:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Publisher
Exec=wine "/home/alice@Wonderland/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Office/Office12/MSPUB.EXE"
Type=Application
Icon=wine
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=true

If you use the nano text editor, you can hit Ctrl+X, the Y, then Enter to save the file. You then need to make the shortcut executable, which you can do by right-clicking on the file on the desktop, selecting Properties, and then makng sure "Executable as Program" is on. Or you can use the chmod command to make the file excutable by a command like chmod +x ~/Desktop/AppName.desktop . You then need to permit launching of the application from the shortcut by right-clicking on it and selecting Allow Launching.

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[/os/unix/linux/wine] permanent link

My wife was using Advanced Diary for journaling on a Microsoft Windows system, but wanted to transition to Linux, so I installed Ubuntu Linux and then, since there is no Linux version of Advanced Diary, I installed Advanced Diary under Wine. She wanted to adjust the size of the Advanced Diary window, but when she attempted to adjust the window size by clicking on the Restore Down icon at the top right side of the window (between the dash and the "X"), the Advanced Diary window became transparent and it was not possible to close it or adjust the size of the transparent box that appeared for the Advanced Diary window. So I had to open a Terminal window to determine the process ID (PID) of the Advanced Diary process with the ps and then kill that process with the kill command. I could also have used the killall command killall AdvancedDiary.exe. I tried closing and opening the program several times. The behavior was consistent — the window would become transparent whenever I tried resizing or minimizing the window. If you are using the GNOME desktop, you can use the steps below to try to resolve the problem. GNOME is the default desktop environment for Ubuntu, but you can verify it is the desktop in use by the command echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP.

Steps that may resolve the problem:

1. Run winecfg in a Terminal window.

2. In the Wine configuration window, click on the Graphics tab.
3. Toggle the settings for "Allow the window manager to decorate the windows" and "Allow the window manager to control the windows" one by one to see if one of those settings change the behavior. When I toggled off "Allow the window manager to decorate the windows", I now no longer saw the icons to adjust the size of the window or minimize the window at the top of the Wine window for Advanced Diary, but when I clicked where I expected them to appear, the window became transparent again. I toggled the setting back on and then toggled off the "Allow the window manager to control the windows" setting. That resolved the problem. I then closed the window and reopened Advanced Diary and toggled that setting on again, also, so that both settings were checked. I could still adjust the window size as expected. I closed and reopened the application several times and was still able to adjust the window size, so just toggling the "Allow the window manager to control the windows" setting off and then back on seemed to resolve the problem.

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[/os/unix/linux/wine] permanent link

I needed to install Advanced Diary on an Ubuntu Linux system. for someone who had been using the program for journaling on a Microsoft Windows system. I had previously installed Wine, a program that allows one to run Windows applications on Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD systems. I used AdvDiary.sh, which contains the following lines, to install Advanced Diary:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -e

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 AdvancedDiarySetup.exe"
  exit 1
fi

INSTALLER="$(realpath "$1")"
PREFIX="$HOME/.wine-advdiary"

echo "Creating 32-bit Wine prefix..."
export WINEPREFIX="$PREFIX"
export WINEARCH=win32
winecfg -v win7 >/dev/null 2>&1 || true

echo "Installing required components (gdiplus, corefonts)..."
winetricks -q gdiplus corefonts

echo "Forcing native GDI+..."
cat > "$PREFIX/user.reg" <<'EOF'
[Software\\Wine\\DllOverrides]
"gdiplus"="native"
EOF

echo "Running Advanced Diary installer..."
wine "$INSTALLER"

echo
echo "✔ Installation complete"
echo "Run with:"
echo "WINEPREFIX=$PREFIX wine \"$PREFIX/drive_c/Program Files/Advanced Diary/Diary.exe\""

To run it, you need to assign "execute" permission to the file, which can be done in a Terminal window with chmod + x filename or chmod a+x filename to make a file executable by all users or chmod u+x filename to make it executable by just the owner of the file, i.e., the user.

alice@Wonderland:~/Downloads$ chmod u+x install-advanced-diary.sh 
alice@Wonderland:~/Downloads$ 

When I ran the shell script .sh file, I realized I hadn't installed Winetricks beforehand, so I installed it with sudo apt install winetricks after running the script. I then reran the installation script for Advanced Diary. The installation completed successfully — I selected the option to have the program opened automatically at the conclusion of the installation — and it appeared to open normally (I had to press Enter in the terminal window to return to the shell prompt).

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[/os/unix/linux/wine] permanent link