Skype seems to be following a tradition. They had first introduced Video chat with 2.0 Beta version for Windows. They followed the same version pattern and introduced Video chat in Linux with version 2.0 Beta for Linux, though this happen a long two years after the windows release.
Whatever said, Skype 2.0 Beta has fulfilled a huge gap in the Linux world. With internet speeds reaching 100 Mbps and more, video chat is soon becoming very common and skype is the most dominant player.
Skype has provided installable packages for most of the prominent distributions on their Linux beta download page.
I had opened the site in Konqueror and choose Ubuntu FeistyFawn, I was expecting that Adept Package installer ( or a variant ) would open up and offer to install, however, Konqueror gave me merely the option to download.
I knew that things cannot be this dumb, so I fired up Firefox ( NOTE:: Firefox is not part of standard Kubuntu install and has to be installed separately).
Firefox appeared a little more intelligent and offered to open the deb file with debian-view
The download was easy, but after the download I did not see any installer being fired. The download simply ended. I knew that the downloaded file will be in /tmp and there it was.
I opened the /tmp directory in Konqueror and clicked on the deb, Luckily this time gdebi fired and gave me the option to install.
I thought that all's done, how wrong I was. The gdebi installer gave an error that another installer ( adept, apt-get etc..) was running. I killed the adept-updater icon I had in the Kicker tray, still the problem remained. Then I fired Adept Manager, which also gave me the same error but also gave me an option to release the lock. I selected to release the lock and Adept Manager crashed. Wow!!
I again Fired Adept Manager and this time it came up without any error, I presumed that the lock is removed and closed it. Again clicked on the downloaded Skype 2.0 deb package to bring up gdebi. This time there was no lock problem and the installer went ahead fine and I became happy( I know I can just delete the lock file, but wanted to do it through proper channel, without any command line tweak).
My happiness was short lived as gdebi was unable to install due to missing dependency of libc6. My only option was to fire up Adept Manager and install libc6, OOPS!! libc6 is already installed only an upgrade was required.
On my third attempt with gdebi installer, I was finally able to install Skype 2.0
What a relief !!.
As expected Skype 2.0 video is all that I expected and I was able to do a video chat with my friend instantly.
Regarding my experience, all I can say is that in Ubuntu has one of the best package management whereas its KDE cousin Kubuntu presented an extremely frustrating experience. Not sure if Canonical does it deliberately, but in no way is the quality of Kubuntu same as that of Ubuntu.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Installing Skype 2 Beta on Kubuntu
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3 comments:
wow, thanks so much. u hv given me the simplest explanation to install skype among so many links i went through. well done !!!!!
Thanks a lot for your efforts, but this guide did not work for me. If you're reading this and having troubles, go and use the method at Medibuntu. I installed all the packages listed and it worked like a charm.
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