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!