A workable way to install skype 4.3 in puppy

[OscarTalks]

@ drblock2

One very easy and convenient way of getting your capture settings right is to use pRecord. Start pRecord from the menu, click the config button which expands the GUI, then near the bottom right there is a button which brings up both retrovol and a vu audio meter. Experiment with your capture settings and look at the vu meter as you speak into the microphone. Easy to see when you have got it right and much better than having to repeatedly use the Skype test call.

[DM was on fire!]

Good evening friends (

[drblock2]

@OscarTalks

Thanks for the suggestion. Using pRecord for sound setup works quite nicely. If pRecord does not record from the microphone neither will Skype.

Following a suggestion on an old (2010) Ubuntu forum, I tried using an external microphone in the jack provided by the Acer Aspire One instead of trying to use the internal microphone.

This does in fact work - in Skype as well, but was thoroughly unnecessary in the earlier ALSA versions of Skype, where it was possible to select the internal microphone.

[cookndrive]

I installed the newest version skype 4.3 as directed in forum. I cannot get the app to stay up long enough to configure the sound or mic or anything else. It keeps saying "aborted" and I did not do anything to it.

I would like to have sound, and mic, but that is not as essential as have skype up so I can at least get information, texts and files. I am so frustrated I could chew and spit nails.

[CGP]

Does anyone have any suggestions for getting Skype 4.3 to work on Puppy 5.2.8?

I installed pulseaudio-2.0-test.pet and skype4.3.0.37-experiment.pet from OscarTalks.

There was no icon in the start menu -> Internet, even after rebooting. But I typed 'skype' at a terminal and got this error message:

pulseaudio: error while loading shared libraries: libspeexdsp.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Bus error

Maybe the solution is obvious to some of you experts, but I have no clue.

Thanks.

[saintless]

I installed the newest version skype 4.3 as directed in forum. I cannot get the app to stay up long enough to configure the sound or mic or anything else. It keeps saying "aborted" and I did not do anything to it.

I would like to have sound, and mic, but that is not as essential as have skype up so I can at least get information, texts and files. I am so frustrated I could chew and spit nails.

Welcome to my world!
I have few computers with the same problem. Typing skype in terminal exits with "Aborted" message.
My guess is Skype 4.3 makes hardware compatibility test and refuses to start if you do not have amount and type of RAM, CPU and GPU that Skype 4.3 finds as compatible to run on them. I have a machine with 1,5 Ghz processor and 512Mb RAM + SWAP and Skype 4.3 gives aborted message too.

If you write to Skype support center you will get some answer like:
"We are very sorry for your troubles! We try to give you the best from our product. Upgrade your distro (and hardware) to Skype compatible level and enjoy our wonderful product.
Please, write us again if you experience any problem! Have a nice day!"

Hope someone can explain this better and find a solution. Till then use friend's computer to save your account details and use old version of Skype as explained here: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=95202
Or buy Skype 4.3 compatible hardware

Edit: Found this as minimal requirements: http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for-linux/

Skype for Linux

* 1 GHz processor or faster.
* 256 MB RAM.
* 100 MB free disk space on your hard drive.
* Video card driver with Xv support.
* Either a built-in or external microphone is required for voice calls.
* An internet connection - broadband is best (GPRS is not supported for voice calls).
* Qt 4.7
* D-Bus 1.0.0
* PulseAudio 1.0 (4.0 recommended)
* BlueZ 4.0.0 (optional)

It could explain why it can't start on P-II and P-III (less than 1Ghz) but does not explain why not on 1,5Ghz machine. Maybe RAM should be DDR2 (I have only SDRAM and DDR1).
Anyway this is not good for machines perfect to run Puppy linux. No way to get latest Skype working there.

[starhawk]

Unmarried marriage counselor here (I do not use Skype) -- but, wasn't there a thread or three somewhere on this forum about MS (which owns Skype now) pulling Skype for Linux, for (their words, not mine) "testing purposes"...?

Was that resolved in some way? or could that be the issue here?

[watchdog]

Does anyone have any suggestions for getting Skype 4.3 to work on Puppy 5.2.8?

I had no success with puppy 4.3.2 and lucid installing or building pulseaudio. I suggest to use the workaround to use skype4.2:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=95202

[Gobbi]

Thank everyone working to make available Skype on Puppyland after 01/08/2014

I had problems signing in last week and didn't want to rely on Windoze or Android for that ...

[OscarTalks]

I have managed to compile pulseaudio-2.0 in Lucid
Also I have packaged the Lucid Skype with the Lucid Qt libraries and plugins as .pet and .sfs

These are uploaded to http://smokey01.com/OscarTalks for people to test.

Install the 2 packages in Lucid Puppy and Skype should start from the menu and sound should work for most people. If not you may need to manually edit the 2 lines which control the soundcard devices. Read this thread for details. The file default.pa in this package is located in /etc/pulse (not /usr/etc/pulse) since this is the convention in Puppy.

[CGP]

@OscarTalks

Thanks for the pulseaudio and skype-4.3.0.37 pets compiled on Lucid Puppy. But no success getting skype to run on Lucid Puppy 5.2.8. The pets seem to install ok. But there are no icons in the start menu. Also /usr/share/applications/skype.desktop has size 0. As do all but one of the skype.png files in various directories. When I try to start skype by typing 'skype' at a terminal, I get this error message:

W: [pulseaudio] main.c: This program is not intended to be run as root (unless --system is specified).
Bus error

And skype is not running.

Thanks very much for the compiling, but something is missing.

[OscarTalks]

The only thing I can suggest is to verify your downloads of Skype.
md5sums
skype-4.3.0.37-lucid.pet = 6241e171b114843dea748cc4728211e5
skype-4.3.0.37-lucid.sfs = 7c78e6e7469c38df661509920c8532c0

As has been mentioned before, certainly in the How To thread
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=94807
You can ignore the run-as-root warning message, it is not a fatal error.

[jamesbond]

watchdog, OscarTalks and CatDude have already contributed so much. I'll just share a little bit of my experience to get things going on Fatdog64 700 using the 32-bit compatibility SFS. The 32-bit compatiblity SFS is actually a cutdown version of Slacko 5.3.3 (an early version of Slacko - I think around the age of Lucid), so here is what I did and some observations.

1. I originally tried with watchdog's w5orig pets. That worked, but pulseaudio was crashing.
2. I replaced "skype" with the extracted version of skype dynamic tarball from skype website, and pulseaudio was still crashing (later on I read watchdog's initial post that the skype packaged in w5orig *is* the same skype dynamic tarball ... )
3. So I decided to compile my own pulseaudio. I found that (for me at least) that pulseaudio 2.0 wasn't stable, so I went up to pulseaudio 2.1 (still crashing), 3.0 (worked) and finally 4.0 (the latest supported version according to Skype) - which worked too. I decided to stay with 4.0 as it has lower cpu requirements (according to its changelog, not according to me )
4. A few experiments to replace the qt4 libs found in the w5orig pets using qt pets found in pet-package-slacko:
a) qt-4.7.3 - skype doesn't start, missing symbol
b) qt-4.8.2 - working, but some problem with threading making skype sluggish.
5. From I read in the first few posts, I get the impression that the qt4libs that watchdog threw in the w5orig pets are actually debian wheezy ones.

Anyway:
- If pulseaudio is aborting: perhaps it may help to upgrade to later version. I'm quite surprise that pa 4.0 still compiles with slacko 5.3.3, but it does.
- If skype is crashing, perhaps its worthwhile to find a qt4 libs that is known to be compatible with the base OS.
- Lastly, according to the note I read on skype forum (but I haven't tested myself) - for debian users it may be better to use the "debian" version rather than the skype dynamic; because the debian version has lesser dependency on system libraries.

Hope that helps for everybody who's still struggling with skype 4.3. And if you runs a blog, or if you are active in the forums elsewhere, please make a or two post asking skype to please restore ALSA support so we don't have to do this horrible pulseaudio thing again ... I know I will.

EDIT: I forgot to attach my build configuration for pulseaudio. With this build, not mucking around with /etc/pulse/default.pa is needed (although you can if you want to). PA will auto-detect all currently attached sound device and will use the first "sink" (=speaker) and "source" (=mic). If you have multiple cards, do "pacmd list-sinks" and "pacmd list-sources" to see which one you want to use, and then "pacmd set-default-sink xx" and "pacmd set-default-source yy" where xx and yy is the number you got from the "list" commands above. You can even change these while the conversation is on going (I think).

Here's my configure line - I disabled *everything* except the mininum necessary:

Code: Select all

./configure --prefix=/opt/pa3-32 --disable-oss-output --disable-oss-wrapper --disable-esound --disable-hal-compat --with-database=simple --disable-udev --disable-glib2 --disable-gtk2 --disable-x11 --disable-legacy-database-entry-format

I think even the IPv6 can be disabled if you want to.

cheers!

[Fiddlesticks]

On slacko 5.7 did the pulseaudio and the skype 4.3. And got video, no sound.
Did 2.2 and got sound and video only because I could choose sound card and mic since I have the motherboard sound and soundblaster live. Since that time 2.2 stopped working.

I am just approaching this from my own logic. It seems like if we could have a control panel on pulse audio that allowed us to select the mic and audio, it just might work.

If there is a way to do this now, please explain to a newbie. If not are there any other work arounds?
Stillsongs

[CGP]

@OscarTalks

The md5sum for the skype-4.3.0.37-lucid.pet which I downloaded from http://smokey01.com/OscarTalks/ was correct. So, I still think there is something wrong with the pet there.

But then I tried the skype-4.3.0.37-lucid.sfs from the same site. It worked! Sort of. Skype starts up nicely. But when I make a Skype test call, my voice is very garbled.

On the other hand, when I record my voice with BaconRecorder, my voice is fine.

My /etc/pulse/default.pa includes the lines:

load-module module-alsa-sink device=dmix
load-module module-alsa-source device=dsnoop

I did not need to add them.

Any suggestions?

Making progress, but still not there.

Thanks.

[jamesbond]

@watchdog, avatars are not showing because according to skype README:

* On some amd64 distributions avatars are not showing, this is a problem
with 32-bits emulation Qt library. Qt tries to find its image format
plugins, but finds a 64-bits version instead and fails to load it.
A workaround is to specify a plugin path when launching skype like this:
- Ubuntu 64 bit: install "ia32-libs" package and launch Skype with:
QT_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/lib32/qt4/plugins skype
- Arch 64 bit (with 32 bit chroot installed in /opt/arch32):
QT_PLUGIN_PATH=/opt/arch32/usr/lib/qt/plugins skype
- Other distributions might have a different path.

The qt4 libs that comes with your w5orig don't have these plugins. My experiment with qt-4.8.2.pet from slacko isn't very successful. Do you mind telling us where you got qt-4.7.1 that was bundled in the w5orig pet, so we can get the rest of the plugins (and hopefully make them work?). Thanks

[OscarTalks]

@ CGP
Those lines in the default.pa file are like that because that is how I edited them in the .pet package since this seemed to be the best default starting configuration for most people.

Actually I think your summing up is right, making progress but not there yet (with Lucid anyway). I thought I had made a great leap forward getting pulseaudio to compile, but on further testing I am finding that it runs, but the device selection is not as reliable as it is in the other Puppies and quite frankly I think I may have to go back to the drawing board with it. The Skype packages themselves are working fine though except for the audio, not sure why you are having a problem installing the .pet, that is a strange one.

I did try the more recent pulseaudio versions, but anything higher than 2.1 would not compile and that one seemed pretty much the same as 2.0 in terms of how it performed.

[jamesbond]

I did try the more recent pulseaudio versions, but anything higher than 2.1 would not compile and that one seemed pretty much the same as 2.0 in terms of how it performed.

Try the configure line I gave you (change --prefix=/opt/pa3-32 to the usual ones that you use), perhaps some of the bad dependency gets dropped out and you can compile successfully. The performance difference is only for pa4 vis pa3.

I'm currently checking debian wheeze packages - qt4 there is 4.8.2, while debian squeeze is 4.6.3. The one that got packaged with w5orig pet is 4.7.1. So where does watchdog get the qt4 lib from?

EDIT:
Found the source of the qt4 libs. If I get it right, that it came from qt-4.7.1.sfs that were originally built by jemimah for puppeee, preserved by watchdog
Here: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 033#704033 and here http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 033#704033. And CatDude found out that the the qt plugins were also available in this package http://smokey01.com/OscarTalks/skype-4. ... ko14.0.sfs - so Oscar did the right thing

[CGP]

@OscarTalks

I am still having the same problem with garbled voice playback from Skype test calls on Lucid Puppy 5.2.8. Everything else is working well. Once I did get the Skype test call to play my voice back well. But now it is gargled again. I have tried different Mic and Capture and Digital Settings using Retrovol. And I have tried allowing Skype to automatically adjust my mixer levels. Or not. And I've tried rebooting several times. Sometimes I wonder if Bacon Recorder and Skype are somehow interfering with each other. Sometimes Bacon Recorder does not record; sometimes it does. I am getting tired of it now, so I will wait for a while before trying again.

[watchdog]

EDIT:
Found the source of the qt4 libs. If I get it right, that it came from qt-4.7.1.sfs that were originally built by jemimah for puppeee, preserved by watchdog

I confirm. I use qt 4.7.1 from expired puppeee repository in my old puppies. It works with recent puppies, too. I shared my download:

http://www.4shared.com/file/Fs1zcssq/qt-471.html