Skype 2.0 on Asus Eee PC

Filed in archive Multimedia on November 24, 2007

Skype just released a beta of version 2.0 of its voice-over-IP client for Linux. One of the most requested feature has been included, i.e., video support. Now Linux users can do video conferencing using Skype!



The Asus Eee PC comes with a web-cam but the bundled Skype client does not support video yet. To get it to work, one needs to get the beta software.

On the Eee PC, fire up Firefox and go to the download page and selecting the Xandros build, as of this writing, it is skype-debian_2.0.0.13-1_i386.deb. Install the application, which overwrites the bundled Skype version, by invoking

$ sudo dpkg -i skype-debian_2.0.0.13-1_i386.deb

Now, you need to do a little hack that I learned from Eeeuser.com Forum user berkus:

Open Terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T)

$ sudo bash
$ cd /usr/bin
$ mv skype skype2

Create a script named "skype" containing the following:

#!/bin/sh
echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/camera
/usr/bin/skype2
echo 0 > /proc/acpi/asus/camera

Make sure that it is executable

$ sudo chmod +x skype

And that is it! Enjoy!