I’ve been using Word and Excel on my Ubuntu for a while now. For the most part, it works pretty good. Just recently, someone asked me about how Outlook worked.
My personal preference is GMail. I like the interface, and I like having my mail in the cloud. When I refresh my computer, it’s one less thing to have to backup. For a while, I did use Thunderbird. It works natively on Linux. Still, I’ll explore Outlook for a second.
For the instructions on installing Office, you can see my post: Ubuntu 12.04: Office and Play on Linux
When I installed Office from Play On Linux, it only created shortcuts for Word, Excel, and Power Point.
I found the shortcuts in the ~/.PlayOnLinux/shortcuts directory. I made an Outlook shortcut by copying the Excel shortcut:
cp "Microsoft Excel 2007" "Microsoft Outlook"
Then, I changed the “EXCEL.EXE” on the last line to “OUTLOOK.EXE” using my favorite editor:
The easiest way to launch it is by opening Play on Linux. Select your new shortcut and click the Run button on the toolbar.
Or, you can run it from the command line (make sure the item in quotes matches your shortcut file name).
/usr/share/playonlinux/playonlinux --run "Microsoft Outlook"
For me, it launches with no problem and it takes me down the road of setting up an email account.
I did make it to the point that it tried to setup the email address automatically.
It did eventually work.
But then, I got this error message:
If you have been able to use Outlook, please comment. Maybe there is a simple fix to this. For me, it doesn’t look like it works.
For more information, you might check out the WineHQ Entry for Outlook.