With my new job I’m doing mostly Java and experimenting with Erlang and Ruby. One of the many benefits is that I’m no longer tied to windows with .NET development. I inherited an upgrade machine this week so I decided to try running Linux full time. I chose Ubuntu 9.04.
One of the tools my team uses for communication is Skype. Skype 2.1 Beta for Linux seems to work very smoothly. Installation was easy, I just download the version for Ubuntu from the Skype website (even though it was compiled for 8.04) onto my desktop, right-clicked the .deb file and choose “Open with GDebi Package Installer.” It had to install a few dependencies, none of which seem to conflict with anything already installed.
The only hiccup was I couldn’t get Skype to receive sound from the Logitech QuickCam 9000 usb webcam I have plugged in (my only microphone). Taking some hints from this forum post, here is what I did to solve it:
- Install the Pulse Audio Manager package: $>sudo apt-get install paman
- Run the Pulse Audio Dev Chooser (which puts a headphone icon in the system tray): $>padevchooser
- Left-click the padevchooser icon and go to “Volume…” then select the Input Devices tab.
- Mute any other microphone devices and adjust the input volume for the webcam device.
- Close the Volume window, and go back to the Dev Chooser Icon, this time clicking “Manager…”
- In the Devices tab, find the input device that belongs to the Quick Cam 9000, select it, then click the Properties button.
- From the properties window, select the value of the Name property and copy it to the clipboard (in my case it was “alsa_input.usb_device_46d_990_9692CEE7_if2_sound_card_0_alsa_capture_0″).
- Finally, go back to the Dev Chooser Icon and click “Default Source” –> “Other…”. Paste in the device name from your clipboard, say okay, and restart Skype. Hopefully it works!
Otherwise, the sound and video quality is very good and I haven’t had any crashes. I can receive screen sharing from other platforms, but sharing my screen is still not supported.
