Reaching the end of my endurance w/o Skype...
 

Okay I figure I'll throw this out here.

I've just about reached the end of my limits wrt Skype running in a Windows 7 Guest OS on my laptop.

I'm still running pure Slackware64 and avoiding multi-lib on it.

I've actually never installed Wine before, I guess just because it was so buggy and didn't work very well back in 1994 or so, and I've never looked back or bothered to give it a consideration since.

But I also have to fire up VirtualBox if I want to run QuickBooks or the Adobe Suite.

So, my choices at this point are:

1.) continue on the same course w/no Skype under Linux

2.) install Wine and hopefully run Dreamweaver, QuickBooks, and Skype

3.) go multi-lib Slackware and then I'll have Skype (Plus a few other things).

So before I embark on setting up Wine....

Would anyone like to weigh in on what you think some of the pros and cons are for me choosing #'s 2 & 3 at this point?

Thanks!

Skype has a static binary available for Linux. It's probably 32 bit but it's static so it shouldn't need anything on your system.
http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/get-...post-download/

I doubt that Quickbooks will work in WINE. At least not if it is Quickbooks Pro.

wine is ok for some things but I would bet multilib will run skype and anything much better.

Just install Alien Bob's multilib packages, its easy as long as you follow the instructuions. Once you get it running you can either install Alien Bob's wine package or compile it from source. Wine compiles just fine in 64bit slackware as long as you have multilib installed. And yes skype runs perfectly with multilib installed.

The static version isn't static :-) They just say it is.

Adam

Go multilib. Install the Skype Linux version. I would pick a Linux version over a Windows any day.

As for Dreamweaver and QuickBooksthe can't say much about them. Here is what Wine's AppDB says:

WineHQ - Adobe Dreamweaver
WineHQ - QuickBooks

One draw back with Wine is uninstalling Windows applications does not always work. At least that has been my experience with Wine.

I'd go with:

4) Get rid of skype and use an open-source, non-proprietary protocol, SIP client like ekiga or qutecom.

Note: This is the choice I made, and it was a good choice. I prefer qutecom, because I've had some trouble with ekiga lately.

It's better to install apps on a different wineprefix, imho. There's few GUI apps to ease this, i use 'playonlinux', it lets to install custom apps too, through a wizard-like interface. Another wine GUI is q4wine.

I use virtualbox for my working environment which consists of a number of Adobe software along with system customizations in windows which are pain to reinstall and setup after every system upgrade - virtualization makes migration a whole lot easier.

Of course, wine prefixes is also very easy to migrate to another computer, if needed. Playonlinux also allows a user to assign different wine versions to an app, a good workaround for regressions and bugs in wine.

While I agree with the sentiment, that isn't always a choice if the people you need to connect to are on Skype.

@tallship
I'm going to echo the advice to go multilib. I've been doing that for some time and Skype works fairly well.

Thanks for all the input :)
 

Okay then. It's settled, I'm goin' multi-lib.

I thought I could just hold off until all the trees had new leaves on them, but alas, I could not.

There were so many great points made, pls forgive if I don't take the time to single everyone out.

In summary, however, I had originally installed skype from the sbo w/o bothering to look and make sure that there was an x86_64 version.

Kinda funny actually. There it was all nice and shiney in my xfce menu and hm... 'how long is this gonna take?' - and then ps didn't show anything. Uh oh.. yup. 32 bit only.

I scratched my head at first, coz Skype said one thing but you live, you learn, and then you learn to trust what the packagers have to say at SlackBuilds.org ;)

On the other hand. I wanted the new beta of NetBeans 7 so badly that I just tried compiling it by hand and it worked, even though the SBo page said it wouldn't fly.

Now, I haven't seen those wine pages in prolly ten years - right after they started that 'ambassador' thing as I recall.

The goal was to document winapps and their stability, and improve upon it.

The last time I actually used wine, it was very buggy, as I mentioned earlier. It only 'just' attempted to run win16 apps back then, WABI did work, but I was actually more concerned with things that DOSEMU could handle - which was, in retrospect, quite a lot - including most of wYNdOZE (in standard mode).

ah, yeah, now I'm recalling having done what looking back seems like crazy things involving goodies such as CSLIP, PLIP, minicom, and kermit - okay it's definitely time to head to bed and get some sleep before I remember that Autocad version 1.x ran off of 5.25" floppies or that I needed a whole 384K to get Lotus 123 off the ground.

Dang. I'm so tired right now that I'll bet I could even still read punch cards like a novel if I chugged half a bottle of Jim Beam Rye.

OH, and my fav card reader - I knew just how high I could stack that sucker without it shredding my programs.....

multi-lib it is :) I'll need to tweak my .../slackpkg/blacklist file to be safe, which I'll begin in the morning.

Good Night all :)

Actually you hace one more option - use skype online from imo.im. That's what I am doing - I ditched the buggy outdated version for Linux. I use it only for text messages though and can't say much about the (video)calls, however those functions seem to be implemented too.

One more thing to add: I too had people that used skype, and I tried everything to make skype work properly and easily with Linux. The fact is it doesn't. So, I switched to something else, qutecom, convinced others to also use this or other SIP clients, and that was it, problem solved.

You may think your problem is solved, but if you decide it isn't ...