Skype on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

If you upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 on a 64-bit platform and try to run skype then you will likely get this error:

skype: error while loading shared libraries: libXss.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This is because libxss1 and a few other libraries have been removed from ia32-libs package.

You will need to enable multiarch and install the extra 32 bit libraries by hand: echo foreign-architecture i386 | sudo tee /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch sudo aptitude update sudo aptitude install libxss1:i386 libqtcore4:i386 libqt4-dbus:i386

This is all that is required to get the statically compiled version of Skype to work.

If you are running the dynamically compiled version or one that comes from mediabuntu or other source, you will need to pull in an extra package. sudo aptitude install libqtgui4:i386

However, in my experience this pulls in too many unnecessary packages and some of them may be broken.

Update: I've done a fresh install of Oneiric and determined the following list of packages that need to be install to get skype working. In the mean time, please bug/pester Skype for real 64bit binaries.

sudo aptitude install libxss1:i386 libqtcore4:i386 libqt4-dbus:i386 libasound2:i386 libxv1:i386 libsm6:i386 libxi6:i386 libXrender1:i386 libxrandr2:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libfontconfig1:i386