How Do I Install Microsoft Office to a Bottle?

[CinnDebianBestDebian]

I'm trying to Install Office 2010 Home and Business to a bottle, but the installer keeps crashing during installation. I checked the Wine Bugzilla, and found that the solution was to limit the processor count to one, and slow the processor cycles to a specific amount. I know that next to the Run Executable button there's a gear where you can type Launch Options, but I wouldn't even begin to know what to put there. Can anyone help me with this? The exact processor settings can be found near the bottom of the comments on this bug:

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45208

[aymansalkhatib]

You don't actually need Bottles' Launch Options for this. The workaround in that Wine bug works from outside Bottles, and it's easier that way.

Why it crashes: the Office 2010 installer has a timing check in one of its steps (ArpWrite). On a modern CPU the step before it finishes "too fast", the check fails and the setup aborts around 50%. Wine developers say it can't really be fixed in Wine (bug 45208), so the trick is to slow the installer down while it runs.

Steps (using cpulimit)

1. Install cpulimit on your system (not inside Bottles):

   sudo apt install cpulimit      # Debian/Ubuntu

2. In Bottles, start the Office setup.exe as usual with Run Executable.
3. As soon as the installer window appears, open a normal terminal and run:

   cpulimit -l 10 -p $(pgrep -i setup.exe | head -n1)

   This limits the installer to ~10% of one CPU core (comment 36 in the bug). Leave the terminal open.
4. Continue the installation normally. It will be slower, that's expected.
5. When the installer finishes, press Ctrl+C in the terminal to stop cpulimit.

Notes:

• If pgrep finds nothing, check the real process name with ps aux | grep -i setup and use that PID instead.
• Limiting to a single core with taskset alone did not fix it for people in that bug report (comment 32); throttling the speed with cpulimit is what matters.
• If it still fails, the other workaround from the bug (comment 39) is to keep the CPU busy while installing: run stress-ng -c $(nproc) in another terminal, then stop it after setup finishes.
• This only matters during installation. After Office is installed you don't need any of this to run Word/Excel.