Linux & MS Office 2007

Burnsy2023 · 2 Apr 2009 at 14:47

Right, I want to get Windows off the laptop and install Linux (or atleast dual boot). However, I can't live without Office 2007, so is there anyway to run all the apps in linux?

VMs could be a way, but it needs to be light weight as the Lappy is only a Dell D600 with 512MB RAM.

Any suggestions?

Burnsy2023 · 2 Apr 2009 at 16:07

pingwing said:
Urm wine can do windows emulation (it could do office 03 fairly well last time i played a few years ago, probably best to google wine and office 07).

Last time I looked I couldn't find anything, but there seems to be a few guides. Has anyone tried it? What's the performance like? Will it be ok on the D600?

What in ms office 07 do you critically need? Open office 3 can replicate pretty much everything out of office 07 now (i think, it had .docx support to start with) and runs nativly in linux

It's not so much file format support, more that Open Office is crap compared to MS office. I love the UI and need applications like Groove. So that's a no show.

Burnsy2023 · 2 Apr 2009 at 16:15

Apparently there could be an issue with Outlook on Wine and issues with Groove on Wine and CrossOver Office

After looking at it, looks like virtualisation will be the only way.

Burnsy2023 · 4 Apr 2009 at 11:11

Rhys said:
Or maybe Citrix with Desktop apps?

You could be a genius, would it work virtualising the app with softgrid or something and then using over the network?

Burnsy2023 · 5 Apr 2009 at 00:54

I know Word, Excel and PowerPOint 2007 all seem to work fine under WINE. Outlook also seems possible but Groove is another story and I need that app.

So, I think it comes down to virtualisation in some form. I'm still investigating application virtualisation via softgrid, this seems a possibility and would be great as I don't have so much of a performance overhead.