Installing native MSI

MikeMcCormack of CodeWeavers is working on a builtin version of msi and msiexec. Please use Wine's builtin implementation if possible, and report any failure as a bug.

As an alternative to these instructions you may also try the winetricks script to install native MSI.

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.

1. Download InstMsiA.exe from here

2. Set wine to run as Windows 98, with native overrides for msi and msiexec.exe (see below)

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.

Wine-20050628 and newer

• wine winecfg

or

• 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"

Before Wine-20050628 (Obsolete)

Your config file (~/.wine/config), should contain something like

WINE REGISTRY Version 2

[Version]
"Windows"="win98"

[DllOverrides]
"msi"="native"
"msiexec.exe"="native"

See Also

• winecfg -- Wine configuration tool

• regedit -- The Wine registry editing tool

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