Installing native MSI

Wine has builtin versions of msi and msiexec, worked on by MikeMcCormack of CodeWeavers. Please use Wine's builtin implementation if possible, and report any failure as a bug.

Note: some .msi files, such as the MicrosoftOffice2003 installer, don't work with MSI 1.0. Since MSI 2.0 runs as a service, it doesn't work in Wine, and you'll have to use the builtin version anyway.

The easy way

You can use the winetricks script to install native MSI:

wget http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks msi2

The harder, older way

1. Download InstMsiA.exe from here

2. Set Wine to run as Windows 98, with native overrides for msi and msiexec.exe:

   • wine regedit nativemsi.reg

   • where nativemsi.reg is

   • REGEDIT4
     
     [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine]
     "Version"="win98"
     
     [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\DllOverrides]
     "msi"="native"
     "msiexec.exe"="native"

3. rm ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system*/msiexec.exe

4. rm ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system*/msi.dll

5. wine InstMsiA.exe (This will install MSI to c:\windows\installer\instmsi0, but won't tell you anything about it)

6. Change the Windows version to whatever you want -- Windows 98 is only needed for the installation.

See also

• winecfg -- Wine configuration tool

• regedit -- The Wine registry editing tool

• winetricks -- quick and dirty script for downloading and installing many native runtimes.