Staticmethod

I finally got around to trying out the new Skype 2.0 release for linux. I had tried the beta a few months ago with almost no luck, so I had kind of put it off for a while.

At first I tried the RPM that was packaged for OpenSuSE 10.3, but didn’t have any luck with it. I’m not sure if it was something I had done by using Smart and some online repositories to mess up my package configuration, but it kept complaining that some 32bit compat libraries for QT4 hadn’t been installed, even though I think they were.

Eventually I just made sure all the libqt4-*-32bit RPMS were installed (via Smart) and then used the dynamically linked tarball version of Skype (from their downloads page).

At first everything was going well except video, then I noticed in their readme that they point out that you need to have the most recent version of the gspcav drivers (webcam drivers for linux), which OpenSuSE 10.3 doesn’t have. I think the version available with the online repositories is something like gspcav 1.00.12 and you need version 1.00.20 (as of when I am writing this). This is the version that was release on 12 Dec 2007. Using the OpenSuSE Build Service I found a pre-compiled version of the gspcav-kmp-default package that matched the latest kernel for OpenSuSE 10.3, and after getting that installed video worked like a charm. I haven’t made a call that uses the video yet, but I was able to get it working in the Skype configuration test window, so I have pretty high hopes.