Skype 4.1 For Linux Released

[vyrgozunqk]

The general and most visible new stuff in 4.1 as i can see without the official changelog is that you have a new option, under the "Video" configuration menu.
It's a switch for turning on and off Auto-exposure for the webcams.

Now if only there was somebody to fix those damn crappy linux UVC to support switching off the auto-exposure on every UVC, will be good !
As always in linux... Something is wrong and doesn't work...

But hey - It's free... Haha ( me being sarcastic)

[Vash63]

So why doesn't Valve do so? Heck even MS can supply a generic package. They can port their Steam client, port their engine but not take what amounts to being a junior intern job of packaging.

wtf are you even talking about? Not only did they not say that Steam would be Ubuntu only, but it's now in Arch's official repos and I know first hand multiple Arch users and a bunch of Arch devs that are in the beta officially... as in Valve knows they're not on Ubuntu and still let them in. Just because they picked Ubuntu first as their official test distribution doesn't mean they're only going to support it... and in fact they've never said anything to indicate that and were clear that Ubuntu was just the FIRST distribution, not ONLY.

[Jedibeeftrix]

will the 32bit opensuse rpm work on a 64 bit opensuse install?

[disi]

There has been MS code in linux for quite a while now. In fact they are one of the larger contributor over the last few kernels.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012...p-contributor/

I read they needed thousands of small contributions to get their hyper-v implementation going, so Linux runs on their hypervisor. The code wasn't good enough and about to be removed from the kernel before that

[AlbertP]

will the 32bit opensuse rpm work on a 64 bit opensuse install?

Ubuntu's multiarch setup works ok for Skype's 32-bit DEBs, maybe openSUSE also has something like multiarch.

[F i L]

So why doesn't Valve do so? Heck even MS can supply a generic package. They can port their Steam client, port their engine but not take what amounts to being a junior intern job of packaging.

Microsoft is a much larger company than Microsoft. Their resources might be divided bit differently. Plus, Valve has only stated that they're targeting Ubuntu for now, who knows what will happen after they work out the bugs and release.... Native Steam is already in the official Arch Linux repos ;-) I'm sure it will be in others soon enough.

[oliver]

Microsoft is a much larger company than Microsoft. Their resources might be divided bit differently. Plus, Valve has only stated that they're targeting Ubuntu for now, who knows what will happen after they work out the bugs and release.... Native Steam is already in the official Arch Linux repos ;-) I'm sure it will be in others soon enough.

That, and really, any distro can take the ubuntu deb and make it work on their distro without too much effort. They are not blocking other distro's, they just picked the most popular one to start with.

Me personally, who doesn't even use ubuntu on his desktop (I do actually have it on my laptop) don't even mind or care. It's fine this way. The only thing they could do, is offer a generic tar.bz2 (behind a not easily find advanced function) so that distro's can pull that in when building packages.

Linux = Linux. If it works on ubuntu, 99% chance it works on any distro you want.


Now on topic:

Where are some screenshots? I don't want to install this dog pile of crap, but at would be curious as to what has changed.

[fhuberts]

_Still_ no 64bit rpm...

Why the heck does it have a dependency on systemd???!!

[Jedibeeftrix]

it's the future of the big rpm based distro's..............?

[blackout23]

Oh hey, now they write "multiarch" instead of "64-bit" in their download page. That's a welcome change to clear up misunderstandings. Though I still have no idea why they won't release a 64-bit version...

It's a Microsoft thing. You have to work at Microsoft to get it.

Steam is a bit tricky with a generic package because it pulls missing libs for certain games and therefore has to speak to the package manager. It's probably not easy to make this generic. Right now it is tailored to apt and Ubuntus Repos.

BTW: On Arch the update breaks something:

/usr/lib32/skype/skype: error while loading shared libraries: libQtWebKit.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory