I'm currently celebrating getting Microsoft Office 2000 to install on my FreeBSD desktop using Wine. I'd never tried this before for 2 main reasons - first, I don't do a lot of word processing, and the open source tools available (particularly Abiword) have always seemed adequate; second, installing under Wine has a reputation for being exceedingly difficult.

Anyway, the situation finally came up that Deb needed to do some work at home that needed her to access a Word document that Abiword was having trouble converting. So I took the plunge (with a small twinge of guilt about tainting my FreeBSD installation with MS software).

Wine installed from ports without any difficulty (cd /usr/ports/emulators/wine && make install clean). After 2 hours of fiddling around, I have learnt the following things:

• For this to work smoothly, the first thing to do is use Wine to install a basic version of Internet Explorer 6.
  
• The install routine for Office should then run smoothly. Make sure you add a name and organisation during installation.
  
• After installation follow the instructions listed in the Wine AppDB entry for Office 2000. Specifically, hack the Wine registry using Regedit to ensure that the specific keys mentioned exist and are modified too the specified values.
  

  And after that, it works. Or at least it seems to. I haven't tried out much of the functionality yet, but it runs and allows you to type a document using Office 2000 on FreeBSD 6.3.