How is that a personal attack?

I was wondering the same thing.....

On topic: Skype works well on any platform and is used by many worldwide. The problems are:
1. It is a closed source protocol and they dont like reverse engineering.
2. because of the above it is linked to 1 company that does what he wants. For the time being it is Microsoft and im curious how will they support Linux in the long run.

If Microsoft decides to pull the plug on the Linux version of the client, there is no alternative and it will never be.

There is one alternative that has about the same features, works well on any platform: Google talk. Sure, the network is private, but the specs are open and many free voip clients are developed for it on all platforms.

I personally use Jitsi (cross platform open source multimessenger (gtalk/yahoo/jabber/facebook/msn etc) with SIP/Jabber/Google audio/video support) for voip over google talk and works fine (best if both sides use Jitsi because you will have the excellent Silk (used in Skype) codec + end-to-end encryption).
I do use Skype too though, many whom i know use it so i have no options here.

Off topic:

And what was the personal attacks on that quote of yours? This isnt the Ubuntu forums ...

Agreed. I've been watching it carefully too, but so far, things are still working fine in Linux.
Will have to check that out. Google hasn't (and won't from what I've heard), release a desktop client for Google Talk for Linux. It DOES work in a browser...sort of. Haven't had good luck with video/audio, but will check out Jitsi, thanks for the link. I'm not locked in to Skype, but for my purposes, it is very stable, and works very well. But, if I can replace it with Google Talk and have the same stability/features I'm used to, that's fine too.

There is no official Google branded desktop application, but they basically use the Jabber protocol (a bit modified, based on older standards, but they share the specs) so many multi messenger clients implemented support for audio/video with Google Talk.
Empathy and Pidgin too have support for audio/video, but Jitsi seems to have done it best,also is more configurable and has some good codecs (the Silk, on which the codec used in Skype is based stands out) and some additional features if used on both sides such as desktop sharing and supplimentary end-to-end audio/video encryption plus this Silk codec that has very good sound quality, almost as Skype even over broadband connection.

Note: Jitsi is under very active development, there are bugs here and there so be patient and if you want to help, here are the mailing lists (bugs are not reported in the bug tracker until they are presented and discussed on the dev list):

http://jitsi.org/index.php/Development/MailingLists

Installing is done by installing the correspondent package of your OS (on debian-based systems the jitsi debian/ubuntu repository is added automatically to your sources):

http://jitsi.org/index.php/Main/Download

I personally use the nightly version of it and had few real problems with it (in these cases i reverted to the previous build until the issue was corrected, that usually took 1-2 days).

Thank you. So you're an open-source developer..

Not exactly, i have no background in programming. I just like this program and i submit issues i find to the mailing lists. They are quite receptive BTW.

Other than that, people should know that there are *functional* alternatives to Skype on Linux. Pidgin and Empathy for ecample do work with Gtalk, but they lack advanced features such as echo cancellation, google contact search, outlook integration (Windows only), transparent codec handling, peer-to-peer encryption etc.

Is this a Joke ? If it's then it's not funny ...and if it's not then you should learn how to take advice without getting pissed like a 5 year old..

NO, shame on you !

Honestly, this was brought up again multiple times. It's done and over with. Also, please refrain from cursing on these forums. Thank you for understanding,

Josh

1 members found this post helpful.

Having no other alternative at my disposal, obviously, because my relatives are Windows users, I tried to install skype on Debian (Squeeze) 64 bit. However, sometimes, skype crashes as soon as I log in. I tried to diagnose the problem by running skype as a regular user from a terminal to check for any error messages that might give me an idea as to what may be wrong. This is the feedback I got:
Please note, that I posted the error without editing it and the repeated warning is exactly what was displayed.


As some claim they are actually using skype on their GNU/Linux distribution, I would like to ask what I can do to install skype without having it crashing on me.

I installed skype using dpkg -i package-name.

P.S.
I read the debian wiki regarding the installation of skype and the problem was apparently resolved as I succeeded to make a video call.

If no problems crop up after this, I will mark the thread as SOLVED in a few days.