Skype HOWTO for Fedora 12, 64-bit

[Marko Vojinovic]

Before anyone starts asking, this is what you need to do to make skype work on 
a 64-bit F12:

(1) Make sure that you have a working sound, pulseaudio and all.

(2) Download the latest skype rpm for Fedora, from skype website. At the 
moment, it is the "skype-2.1.0.47-fc10.i586.rpm" for Fedora 10.

(3) Do a yum install of the following:

glibc.i686
alsa-lib.i686
libXv.i686
libXScrnSaver.i686
qt.i686
qt-x11.i686
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 libv4l.i686

This will pull in cca 86 or so .i686 packages, mostly libraries.

(4) Go to a directory where you downloaded the skype rpm. Do a
"yum --nogpgcheck localinstall skype-2.1.0.47-fc10.i586.rpm".

(5) Start skype in a terminal. It should Just Work, using default devices for 
audio input and output (AFAICS, pulse will be chosen automatically). Test 
sound and test call should also work out-of-the-box. At least they did for 
me... If it Just Works, you don't need to start it from the terminal anymore.

If it doesn't Just Work, you will probably see a message in the terminal 
complaining about not finding "somelibrary.so" or similar. In that case:

(5a) Do a "yum whatprovides somelibrary.so". Yum should reply with 
"somepackage.i686" that provides that library.

(5b) Do a "yum install somepackage.i686", and restart skype.

(5c) Repeat (5a)-(5b) until skype stops complaining. But the packages from 
step (3) should cover mostly all dependencies.

That's it. This was tested and verified to work on a clean install of F12 from 
a 64-bit KDE Live CD, of course after a full "yum update". Anyone having 
positive/negative experience with other (non-KDE, non-clean-install) setups, 
feel free to share.

Enjoy! :-)

Best, :-)
Marko