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.