You, Skype and 64 bit

If you are connecting people around the globe - for whatever reasons - love on the air, meeting with your collaborators - skype gets you going. But if you are using any 64 bit unix based system, you might face trouble! It is not so intelligent marketing strategy from the skype team either as in this modern era more and more people are inclined to 64-bit linux systems, rather than stupid W-systems. Here I would try to walk you through the trouble of skype on new fedora darling,

Go to the skype site and install one for fedora 10+. If you are thinking this is all done and you can watch the pretty face of your loved ones - you are far from the reality,

> skype &
and it will probably tell you the following error,

skype: error while loading shared libraries: libasound.so.2: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

Isn't that stupid? Oh yes! Absolutely! Skype tries to find out 32-bit ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture)!

Well what can we do now to get around with this?

> ldd /usr/bin/skype

and you will see a lot of libraries are 'not found'. For example - libasound.so.2, libXv.so.1, etcs ....

Once everyone of them are found properly, you are fine to go ahead.

Log into your system as king, I mean as superuser/root
> su -
Now we will install few dependencies

> yum install alsa-lib-1.0.21-3.fc12.i686
> yum install libXv.i686*
> yum install libXScrnSaver.i686*
> yum install qt.i686
> yum install qt-x11*.i686
> yum install pulseaudio-libs.i686
> yum install pulseaudio-libs-glib2.i686
> yum install alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686

Now do again,
> ldd /usr/bin/skype

I hope this time around all the dependencies are linked correctly.

> skype &

Happy skyppppping!

Millions plus one

This is my first writing and is certainly not going to be interesting but may be informative. Well, this will be 'about blog'. These facts are worthwhile to know if you are already following, writing or planing to die creative. Here are some data about blog and some natural consequential questions. Since 2002, the blog search engine Technorati is tracking 133 millions of blogs and two-third of them are junked by male writers. Here comes one more! Now the obvious question is - why there are more male writers than females? Do male bloggers have more spare time than females? Do females have less access to internet? Are Adams more outspoken than Eves and seek pride to tell the unknown world about their maturity of thoughts? Is it just to tell people at a Friday night party - 'I am a blogger' (that is certainly creative) - and when I have nothing to do I read my own blog! I don't know! I think the statistical data that only 40% of the bloggers have graduate degrees - is even more interesting since 72% of the blogers think they write to share their expertise. Well, I have to agree education and expertise does not go hand in hand always or it might well be the case that a pseudo-expert loves to believe that he/she has a great deal of expertise to advise the world on internet. This is the question of bigger pride than one deserves, and that is a somewhat unified human psychology, I guess. We all believe to deserve more pride than we will ever have. Another interesting data - more than half of the bologgers are married and are parents. Interesting! Is it due to the fact of increasing wise'ness (and an urgency to share it) with increasing age or due to increasing interest in escaping from a 'troubled' life! They and their kids know! Lastly, blogging is a good way to meet new people as 42% bloggers have become friends with some one and met in person in the real world. So if you are in need, create one and hope for the best.