I'm sure this has been done many times before but there wasn't much information on it so I thought I would add my 2½ pence worth. After being pressured by my mum of all people to start using Skype (I know - how embarassing) I thought it was time to install it. The problem is thsi though: I'm running Debian AMD64 which is unsupported. I was very pleased to see that Skype support Linux and a number of other operating systems and I suspect that is part of their success. I presume that they don't currently feel that there are enough users of 64bit OSes to warrent the effort of making a 64bit port. Hopefully this will change in the near future. All is not lost however. It's actually rather easy to get Skype running on Debian AMD64.

The .deb package of Skype won't install as it is only built for 32bit machines so grab the statically compiled .tar.bz2. Unpack that somewhere sensible, I use /var/local/<my account> as a play area, and simply run the skype application. It took a long time to start on my machine and I thought it had failed but after about 2 minutes the window popped up and I was able to use it without problem. It's worth noting that it also took a long time to shut down. There is no video capability in the linux version of Skype but I can't say I really miss that. Sound was detected perfectly via Alsa which was nice but could be a problem if other components are using OSS. Hopefully something like Phonon will fix the mess that is Linux sound systems in the near future.

Time to get chatting...