> Here's why I'm a bit frustrated at the moment with Ubuntu:
>>I think it's a bit short sighted to blame your problems on a Ubuntu when
>>the problem is caused by a non-free application being distributed in
>>binary only form. The blame should be appropriately placed with Skype.
You are quite right, perhaps I should have "blamed" Skype for the lack
of appropriate support for a still young (yet surprisingly mature)
distro. Keeping in mind it was a bit of a rant as to why (in this
particular instance) I prefer(red) SuSE, and also this install of
Ubuntu was to revive/choke out the last life of this laptops hard
drive, and is not of any real importance, shall we say.
I have since installed breezy, and had Skype working within minutes,
all appropriate packages downloaded through Synaptic (yay no dpkg!) and
so on. I've even changed totem-gstreamer to totem-xine with xine-ui and
was able to get the multimedia stuff working quite quickly. I must say,
6 months of obviously hard work has made a huge difference to Ubuntu,
and I must congratulate all who develop in and around it.
> I wanted to install Skype. Skype is a KDE app, (and it looks ugly in
> Gnome - there are workarounds, but aside from that). It requires
> libqt3-xxxxxxxx.
>
> Firstly, I was trying to install it from the .deb package distributed
> on skype.com (skype_1.2.0.18-1_i386).
>>Luckily, as fulfilling as it is to be a Free software zealot and say
>>it's all Skype's fault there are more pragmatic members of the community
>>who are happy to put time and effort into make non-free software like
>>Skype work seemlessly.
My experience with Hoary was not nearly as pleasant as the one with
Breezy. I must say that I much prefer Breezy over Hoary (surprised) and
it is so much quicker than SuSE 9.3, but this may be due to the
light-weight nature of the distro and the fact that I have bugger all
installed on a clean (but slowly dying) hard drive and clean /home
partition.
To get Skype working nicely on Ubuntu you need to look no further than
the Ubuntu Guide (http://ubuntuguide.org) which links to nicely
built .debs for Ubuntu that I've used successfully from Warty -> Hoary
and now for Breezy.
See specifically
http://ubuntuguide.org/#skype
Correct. Once again - instructions worked fine with Breezy, but not so well with Hoary.
After reading the rest of your email and the packages you installed I'm
surprised that your box still works at all!
So was I. In fact, I went so far as to leave the laptop on until I was
able to download and burn the Breezy ISO the next morning (after some
sleep). In saying that, I did end up having to reboot it, as for some
reason it thought the CD-RW drive was busy, and, well, yeah. Believe it
or not, the system did boot, apparantely without error; though there
were a few complaints that it couldn't talk to locale (unsurprisingly).
However, all is well now (until my hard drive and more RAM arrives), at
which time it will be a tougher decision than originally anticipated to
choose between SuSE 10 and Breezy. It hasn't taken long (or much) to
like Ubuntu so far, though as a "full featured" distro, I will probably
end up with SuSE.
Or I could partition the drive and just have both, sharing a /home
partition (with different user-folders) - Ubuntu for lightweight
applications (eg when I'm on the tram and need to write down a URL, for
example) and SuSE for my Development Stuff or something.