I’ve bought myself an Asus EEE 1000H netbook for Christmas, and very nice it is too. Although I don’t intend to use it much for work, every now and then I want to check a campaign, so Adwords Editor is a must. But how to run it under Linux?

Although my machine shipped with Asus’ customised version of Linux (Xandros), I installed Ubuntu EEE almost immediately. (Perhaps the easiest Linux install ever, the longest part was downloading the ISO file.)

Wine allows you to run Windows applications in Linux, though of course it’s not guaranteed that every program will install and run flawlessly. Adwords Editor fits into this category.

So, how do you get it running? Follow these steps (I’m assuming you have familiarity with Linux and Wine already):

1. Download the latest version of Adwords Editor (7.0.0 at the time of writing).
2. Install into Wine in the usual way. At this point it won’t run: it will complain that it “couldn’t load XPCOM”.
3. Go to your (or a friend’s) Windows machine and copy the files msvcp71.dll and msvcr71.dll from the folder c:/Windows/system32.
4. Paste the files into the .wine/drive_c/windows/system32 folder which is in your home directory.
5. Open the Wine configuration window and select the Libraries tab. In the New Override for Library box, type msvcp71 and click add. Repeat for msvcr71. Note that .dll is not typed in.
6. Adwords Editor should now run.

Thanks to a thread at WineHQ for this information, it worked wonders for me. But with all things Linux, YMMV.