Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Skype on Debian?

























I was working on debian when someone wanted to chat with me on skype.
I quickly run the command aptitude search skype. Nothing came out.
So I went to http://www.skype.com and click the download page.
I found out that they have skype for various different distro for linux.
They also have tarballs for static and dynamic libraries.

I was happy to see they have a version for debian etch. But unfortunately,
I was using debian unstable. I tried my chances anyways, and downloaded
the .deb for etch. After downloading, I tried to install, but apparently, I didn't
have the qt-libraries to install it. That was easy, all I needed to do is aptitude install it.

And so I did....a quick

debiana> aptitude install libqt4-core libqt4-gui

Then I can run this command...

debiana> dpkg -i skype-debian_1.4.0.118-1_i386.deb


Everything installed nicely, and I can run skype.
Running skype is as easy as

debiana> skype &

Skype run nicely, and I logged into skype. All the users were there displayed nicely.
I configured my sound device, and tried to play around alsamixer to get the microphone volume louder.

Unfortunately, the linux version has no support for video yet.
So I might still have to revert to windows when I want to use skype.
But the voice communication is excellent.....