skype on Debian Linux (64bit)
My aunt asked that I get my mom hooked up on skype for my mom’s B-day. That involved getting a webcam and hooking it up on my parents’ Ubuntu system. Since I’ve never done anything with webcams, I didn’t know where to start. This blog entry is about trying skype and the webcam going on my Debian Sqeeze laptop.
Being a bit (positively) biased towards Logitech hardware, I googled for Linux support for Logitech webcams. I came across Linux UVC driver and tools, which was a great start. I soon bought the Logitech Webcam C200.
The webcam was a great deal for $40, and worked under linux out of the box. To test it I used the guvcview utility. Everything worked great.
Next I wet to get the latest version of skype for Linux. My first reaction was: Oooh, they have a Debian package for Lenny. Unfortunately it was a 32bit package. They had a 64bit package for Ubuntu, so I grabbed that. It was a bit disappointing as it was a 64bit package, with 32bit binaries. Oh well.
Skype started fine, and I was able to create an account. However as soon as I logged in, the app crashes. I did some googling and found:
- Skype on amd64 debian testing - on debian.net
- Skype Client for Linux - Crash right after login - on skype developer forums
From these I learned that removing /usr/lib32/libpulse* files does the trick. Since I am not a pulse user, I didn’t mind doing…
sudo mkdir /usr/lib32-oldpulse/
sudo mv /usr/lib32/libpulse* /usr/lib32-oldpulse/
Now I could start skype and make voice calls. Video didn’t work. When I went to options to test my video configuration, I noticed that it failed to work there too.
After some further googling I discovered that to fix this is to
run gstreamer-properties and configure video output to use X Window System (No Xv).
Now it all works.
UPDATE: my parents’ system runs 32bit Ubuntu 8.10 (probably because that’s what was recent when I set it up). I had to remove the pulse library files there too to get skype to work with the microphone on the webcam.