A while back, I typed up my research on Skype, and I forgot to publish it. My more recent installations on my current laptop haven’t required as much tinkering to get it to work. Still this article might help someone, and I already had it put together. So, here it goes…
I was able to install Skype on Ubuntu 11.10 quite easily. The problem was that it was only minimally working. I had no sound and it would not detect my laptop’s webcam.
Sound Issue
The first issue was that I had no sound. Come to find out, my notifications sound was muted and turned all the way down. I launched “System Settings” from the dash. Then, I went to “Sound”:
Then, I had to uncheck the Mute option and I slide the volume up to the top:
Webcam
Using the lsusb command, I found that I have this web camera built into my laptop:
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 05a9:2640 OmniVision Technologies, Inc. OV2640 Webcam
This fixed it for me:
sudo rmmod uvcvideo sudo modprobe uvcvideo
You can try to run Skype like this:
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype
You may need to search for the library because it may be in a different location:
$ locate v4l1compat.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so