Quoting Ian McDonald <ian.mcdonald(a)jandi.co.nz>:
Folks,
I'm meant to be making a Skype call at 5 am tomorrow (yeah!!) to talk about Linux but I have had bad experiences with Skype previously with sound working (or more to the point not!) and preferred not to use Windows in case I need to look something up that I'm talking about.
Anyway I've now found that Skype for Linux has a new beta out which now uses ALSA by default as the sound system instead of OSS. What this means is that sound seems to "just work" now for me.
If you have had problems with Skype have a look at: http://www.skype.com/download/skype/linux/13beta.html
I had similiar trouble with the earlier version, sound being flaky and sometimes working, sometimes not. tried the new beta out the other day and it just works. had to muck around a bit to get the mic working with skype but think thats just the soundcard / mixer combo. found out after mucking around with settings for a couple of hours and skypes test call service and now a happy skyper. that was basically the last thing to get going I wanted on my laptop and a very happy Ubuntu user now :) Haldor