Office setup starts, runs for a while, then dies with an error and rolls everything back — the classic Wine experience. Most failures come from three fixable causes — a 64 bit prefix, missing components, or a poisoned half-install. Work through these fixes in order.
Do not keep re-running the same installer and hoping for a different result. Each fix below removes one known cause of failure, and the order matters. One rule before everything — if an earlier attempt half-installed Office, that prefix is poisoned. Leftovers from a failed setup are the top reason the second and third attempts fail in exactly the same place.
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 has encountered an error during setup.
The 64 bit default prefix is the number one cause of Office setup errors. Delete the damaged attempt completely and rebuild the prefix as 32 bit — partial deletions leave the failure in place.
WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-office wineserver -krm -rf $HOME/.wine-officeWINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-office winecfgSetup failures in the middle — including the well-known Error 1935 — often trace back to libraries the installer assumed Windows already had. Give the fresh prefix its components first, then install.
WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-office winetricks corefonts msxml6 riched20If a terminal log complains about a Visual C++ runtime, add it the same way, for example winetricks vcrun2008 with the same prefix variable in front. Winetricks fetches proper Microsoft copies, which is safer than random DLL download sites.
Winetricks usually sets this for you, but on stubborn systems the override does not stick — and without the native riched20, installer screens freeze, licence text never loads, and setup dies quietly.
WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-office winecfgriched20 in the override boxDouble-clicking setup.exe hides the evidence. Running it from a terminal shows exactly where and why it stopped — and the last few lines are usually the whole story.
WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-office wine setup.exe and watch the outputWINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-office wineserver -kLines starting with fixme are noise — Wine prints thousands. Look for err lines near the point of failure and fix that specific thing instead of changing everything at once.
Wine tells programs which Windows it is pretending to be, and Office's installer behaves differently for each answer. The wrong setting causes failures that look random.
Change one variable at a time. If you change the prefix, the components and the Windows version together, you will never know which one fixed it — and the next install becomes guesswork again.
The video shows the install done right from the start — prefix, components and setup in the correct order.
▶️ Watch Full VideoIt usually points to a missing runtime or MSXML component inside the prefix. Install the winetricks set — corefonts, msxml6 and riched20 — into a completely fresh 32 bit prefix, then run setup again.
Kill it with wineserver -k using your prefix variable, delete the prefix, and rebuild with components installed first. A hang is often the installer waiting for a component or service that is not there.
Yes. Mount it with sudo mount -o loop office2010.iso /mnt and then run setup.exe from /mnt with your WINEPREFIX variable set, exactly as you would from a downloaded file.