Getting Office 365 (and maybe others) to Work Cleanly

[wd5gnr]

I had this working but some recent Office update blew up a lot of things. The main problem is that Office insists on spinning up some services that persist, so you can never figure out when the app closes. So running something "sticks" and xfreerdp never exits which causes lots of heartbreak.

I recently set out to fix that (and some graphic artifacting). I kind of fixed it, but it is sub ideal so it isn't a fix all. The main problem I have is that if you open, say, Excel and Word and then later close one, the other will close too. YMMV.

There are a few things I did differently. First, I edited the main script to fix one little small thing. If you are the CLI and do something like:

winapps word-o365 foo.docx

This fails to work because it can't see that foo.docx is in your home directory. The fix is to find the comment # Convert path from Unix to Windows style and change under it to FILE_PATH=$(realpath "$2" | sed \

While I was there, I added:

-e 's|^'"/tmp/"'|\\\\tsclient\\linuxtmp/|' \

I also added a mapping from /tmp to linuxtmp in the freerdp options. Now I can work on things in /tmp which I often do.

Ok so that's not really the problem.

First I have a shell script for Word (example; they are all the same):

#!/usr/bin/env bash
/home/alw/.local/bin/winapps word-o365rdp "$@"

Then I have a customized app call word-o365rdp. To make it, I copied word-o365 in ~/.local/bin/winapps-src/apps to word-o365rdp. I also, after making changes, copied the files to ~/.local/share/winapps/apps so I didn't have to reinstall. For the info, I pointed the executable away from winword.exe and to a wrapper batch file. I put all of mine in c:\rdpbin but it doesn't matter. So:

--- everything the same except for ---
# GNOME shortcut name
NAME="Word-rdp"

# Used for descriptions and window class
FULL_NAME="Microsoft Word via rdp"

# The executable inside windows
WIN_EXECUTABLE="C:\\rdpbin\\psword.bat"
--- the same from here down, too ---

Now on the Windows side, you need psword.bat and, in the same directory psword.ps1.
Here's the batch file:

@echo off
start "" powershell -NoLogo -NoProfile -WindowStyle Minimized -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File c:\rdpbin\psword.ps1 %*
exit

And the Powershell script:

param(
[Parameter(ValueFromRemainingArguments = $true)]
    [string[]]$Files
)

try {
   if ($Files -and $Files.Count -gt 0) {
        $proc = Start-Process winword.exe -ArgumentList @($Files) -PassThru 
      } else {
        $proc = Start-Process winword.exe -PassThru
      }
Wait-Process $proc.Id
}  finally {
  tsdiscon
  Start-Sleep -Seconds 3
  logoff
}

WinApps spins off the batch file which quickly exits, the batch file spins off the powerscript file which runs minized. The powerscript file starts Word. When Word exits, it disconnects RDP and then logs off.

Maybe it shouldn't log off. I know I could put it all in the Powershell but it makes it harder to launch for winapps.

Anyway, this seems to work and I may experiment with not logging off which, I think would help with running multiple things.

I just wanted to share this in case it helps someone else. If you improve on it, let me know.

[oskardotglobal]

I feel like we could PR the "realpath" fix to main, no? It seems very useful. Also, you should make sure that you commit changes in winapps-src or something, since that's a git clone of the actual repository, you wouldn't want your changes to be overridden by git weirdness.

Additionally, if we can have this script maybe not log off users, I feel like a version of this could be included with winapps directly so that users could just change a WIN_EXECUTABLE="winword.exe" to something like WIN_EXECUTABLE="C:\\rdpbin\\longrun.bat winword.exe" and get the same fix for different pieces of software. Thoughts?

[wd5gnr]

Yes I was surprised the realpath isn't in there already.

I haven't been successful with getting things to not log off but just drop the session. But yes, you could wrap it in one wrapper although that might complicate cases where you want to actually send an argument.

I think the real issue is I'm using a real piece of hardware instead of a VM. If I logoff, that kills everything open. However, if I don't logoff but just break the session, then if you run AppA and then run AppB, AppA winks as its session goes away and a new one starts. Then both A and B will show up, but closing either one of them will close both of them.

I don't have a good solution for that now other than "only run 1 windows app at a time."