Skype 2.1 on CentOS 5
The new skype 2.1 beta (woohoo - Linux users are now only 2.0 versions behind Windows, way to go Skype!) doesn't come with a CentOS rpm, unlike earlier versions. And the Fedora packages that are available are for FC9 and FC10, which are too recent to work on a stock RHEL/CentOS 5 system.
So here's how I got skype working nicely on CentOS 5.3, using the static binary tarball.
Note that while it appears skype has finally been ported to 64-bit architectures, the
only current 64-bit builds are for Ubuntu 8.10+, so installing on a 64-bit CentOS
box requires 32-bit libraries to be installed (sigh). Otherwise you get the error:
skype: /lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory.
# the available generic skype binaries are 32-bit, so if you're running a 64-bit # system you need to make sure you have various 32-bit libraries installed yum install glib2.i386 qt4.i386 zlib.i386 alsa-lib.i386 libX11.i386 \ libXv.i386 libXScrnSaver.i386 # installing to /opt (tweak to taste) cd /tmp wget http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-beta-static cd /opt tar jxvf /tmp/skype_static-2.1.0.47.tar.bz2 ln -s skype_static-2.1.0.47 skype # Setup some symlinks (the first is required for sounds to work, the second is optional) ln -s /opt/skype /usr/share/skype ln -s /opt/skype/skype /usr/bin/skype
You don't seem to need pulseaudio installed (at least with the static binary - I assume it's
linked in statically already).
Tangentially, if you have any video problems with your webcam, you might want to check out
the updated video drivers available in the
kmod-video4linux package from the shiny new
ELRepo.org. I'm using their updated uvcvideo module with a Logitech
QuickCam Pro 9000 and Genius Slim 1322AF, and both are working well.