Tested Skype on my laptop
After various requests and personal interest in the matter, I finally tryed to get skype working on my Sony Vaio SZ6 with Arch Linux 64bit and pulseaudio installed. Skype and linux never mingled all that well. Supporting linux was never high on their todo list and they surely acted upon it. Skype has never gotten past the beta stage and they released a new version only once in a while. To give you an idea, Skype is at version 2.1.0.47 for linux while it is already at 4.1 for windows. There were many things that held me back in the past to try out Skype but this latest release did put some thing in motion though.
Skype is strictly 32bit and my Arch Linux installation is 64bit. While this should only be a matter of installing the necessary 32bit libraries, I’m not very keen on doing so because I just don’t like mixing 32bit and 64bit on a single installation. Why would I otherwise want 64bit, right? This once, for testing purposes, I figured I could put my personal considerations aside.
Another conflict is pulseaudio, which, until this latest release, was not supported by Skype. I’m glad they did as pulseaudio will be used a lot more now that gnome uses it by default. Oddly enough, they dropped oss support. This doesn’t affect me but certainly a lot of other people.
Video (webcam) support is also a usual area of conflict. Handling webcams is not done in a unified way on linux and hence causes a lot of conflicts. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to do a thing other than installing the driver for my webcam.
So after installing the necessary 32bit libraries (including pulseaudio) and installing the driver for my webcam, Skype worked without any problem for the first time. Now it is simply a matter of crowding my skype contact list.