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Before I describe what I am trying to do, I want to make clear that I have about 10 years of experience with Linux OS and Ubuntu and a lot of experience with VirtualBox. This is not for me but for a very stubborn friend...

I want to have a link on the desktop to an application (specifically MS Office 2013 app) that is installed inside a VirtualBox. Once that Link is clicked I want to start MS Office (Word, Excel, Poverpoint) in a seamless mode. It would be great if it were possible to automatically open a *.docx file in a MS Office Word inside VirtualBox, by just double clicking on the file inside the host OS (Ubuntu).

I know it is very specific and a lot of work for something useless, but I would appreciate if anyone could at least point me in some direction.

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    Does it need to be via a VM? Would your friend be satisfied with wine running Office instead?
    – terdon
    Mar 4, 2016 at 17:57
  • 3
    This should do what you need: askubuntu.com/questions/153894/…
    – Takkat
    Mar 4, 2016 at 20:57

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A very rough outline of what I would do:

  • Have a sender application in Ubuntu that you associate with all these filetypes. It receives the path to the file and then translates that into something the VM can understand (eg a samba share).

  • It sends this path to a daemon running on the VM. All this does is listens for connections from the sender and then opens the paths that it gets sent with the default application.

Again, this is all very high-level but it shouldn't be too hard to script out.

There are some good alternative ideas bubbling around in chat too.

The rest is built into VirtualBox (seamless mode).

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If the requirement of a full-emulated virtual machine is not hard, you can try with emulation through wine. If that fails, I do not know how it will work with Office 2013 (I use 2010 at my university), but I am really satisfied with Crossover.

It is not a free software (it is built over Wine and contribute back to it, but it is much more compatible with new softwares) --- so you could test first with wine (which is a FOSS solution) to see if it works.

Once installed, I have installed Office 2010 through it, and now it is seamlessly integrated in the desktop. Through the configuration interface you can choose, for example, to open .docx files with Miscrosoft Office and .doc with LibreOffice with ease.

It has some glitch sometime, and you need to choose click-to-focus to make it work, but it works well (at least, Word, Excel and Powerpoint).

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Disclaimer I have no relations with Codewavers and I do not receive money from them --- I am just a client.

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