A little place of calm

Hurrah! Skype on 64-bit Debian!

Oh, tonight is a night of success! :)

Thanks to this guide i have just managed to get Skype working on my 64-bit Debian. It required a few extra libraries for me. I am impressed by this getlibs trick. I think i'll be using that a few more times. Thanks lovely lovely thoughtful people who make Linux life so much easier!

The first thing is to download the latest version of Skype packaged for i386. There are a few pre-requisites, then you install it with --force-architecture.

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs 
sudo apt-get install libqt4-core libqt4-gui 
sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture skype-debian_2.0.0.68-1_i386.deb

Try running Skype.

skype
skype: error while loading shared libraries: libXss.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I'm not sure whether this bit was actually necessary. It certainly didn't make it work:

sudo apt-get install libxss1 libxss1-dbg libxss-dev

Getlibs is the way to go! Download from http://www.boundlesssupremacy.com/Cappy/getlibs/getlibs-all.deb

And then:

sudo dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb
sudo getlibs -32 libXss.so.1
sudo getlibs -32 libQtDBus.so.4
sudo getlibs -32 libQtGui.so.4
sudo getlibs -32 libdbus-1.so.3

Try again

skype

And it works! :) Unfortunately none of my friends are online so i can't test whether it actually works! I may still have some microphone issues to work out.

Update: Aha, i got the microphone input to work. It's really simple: you just go to Volume Control and unmute the Capture. If you don't see that option, go to Edit – Preferences and tick on 'Capture'.