Microsoft Office under Linux: .lnk files, WINE, Crossover, and you.

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For the past three years or so, I’ve been running Linux exclusively on all my desktop PC’s. I used Ubuntu until they moved to the new Unity interface (which I hated), then tried Lubuntu for a while, went through Xubuntu and Kubuntu, and then settled on Linux Mint last year.

However through all of this, I’ve never been able to rely on LibreOffice or OpenOffice for my documents. It’s just not mature enough to go head-to-head with Microsoft Office. [I just learned that LibreOffice 4.0 has been released – I’ll give it a try and see how it’s coming!]Office 2010 works great under WINE, except for the dozens of lnk files

The solution, for me, is to run Microsoft Office under an environment such as WINE, PlayOnLinux, or Codeweavers Crossover (all of which are actually WINE, of course). Office 2010 works great under WINE, apart from the dozens of unwanted lnk files.

I’ve been running under Crossover since about 2010, after I got a free version from Codeweavers’ Lame Duck Presidential Challenge, which has probably been one of the greatest marketing moments in history.

Now that I’ve given you the history, here’s the reason for this post:

Office 2010, under recent versions of both Crossover and WINE, has this awful tendency to scatter-spray dozens of .lnk files all over my file system. This is made marginally worse by the fact that the operating system doesn’t recognise them as Something That Should Open In Word(tm).

Turns out this is a bug in WINE. The resolution is to create a “Recent” folder, like so:

mkdir ~/.cxoffice/Microsoft Office 2010/drive_c/users/crossover/Recent

To be a bit more abstract, that is:

~/.cxoffice/<Office bottle name>/drive_c/users/<crossover username>/Recent

If you’re using PlayOnLinux or WINE, you won’t have a .cxoffice folder – you’ll need to do this under the .wine folder instead. Simply replace .cxoffice in the command above with .wine and you’ll be good to go. The Recent folder should now contain any .lnk files created by Office.

I found this solution on the Crossover Support Forums at this link: http://www.codeweavers.com/support/forums/general/?t=26;msg=128936