Skype 4.0 for Linux
First off, we’d like to thank our Skype for Linux users for your patience awaiting Skype 4.0 for Linux, codenamed ‘Four Rooms for Improvement,’ which is now available. With this release, we have finally filled the gap with our other desktop clients and we are now making many of the latest Skype features, as well as a lot of UI improvements, available to our penguin lovers.
You will find four major changes in this release:
- We have a new Conversations View where users can easily track all of their chats in a unified window. Those users who prefer the old view can disable this in the Chat options;
- We have a brand new Call View;
- Call quality has never been better thanks to several investments we made in improving audio quality; and
- We’ve worked on improving video call quality and have also extended support for more cameras.
Of course, we have loads of other small improvements and fixes. As you can imagine, the list is so long it would take too much time to write it all, but some are worthy of mention:
- improved chat synchronization
- new presence and emoticon icons
- the ability to store and view phone numbers in a Skype contact’s profile
- much lower chance Skype for Linux will crash or freeze
- chat history loading is now much faster
- support for two new languages: Czech (flag:cz) and Norwegian (flag:no)
Note, the very first time you start Skype for Linux 4.0 might take a few minutes (depending on how lengthy your chat history is). Please do not close Skype during this time. Subsequent starts will load much more quickly.
So what are you waiting for? Try the new version of Skype for Linux and let us know what you like and what you don’t like. Please report any issues or share your feedback in our Support Network or our public issue tracker so we can make the Skype for Linux experience even better.
Marco, KC and the Linux team
Skype for Linux is available in the following languages:
Brazilian Portuguese (Eduardo Porto Teixeira), Bulgarian (Nikolay Filipov & Nikolina Filipova), Czech (Alexandr Kara), Estonian, French (Cédric Lamouche), German (Claudius Henrichs), Italian (Marco Cimmino), Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian (Viktoras Kriukovas), Norwegian (Alexander Stevenson), Polish (Karol Szastok), Portuguese (Francisco Miguel Ferreira), Romanian, Russian (Pavel Shevchuk), Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish (Ömer Emin Dede), Ukrainian (Oleh Nykyforchyn)
Update 17.06.2012:
Generic packages are now available.
Thank you very much indeed!!!
So far the new version appears to work well, although the video quality was slightly better in the old version (perhaps, due to the fact that the window was smaller).
Are there any plans to provide a 64 bit version for Fedora?
Thanks for user friendly interface.
But new version have some strange security issues for my opinion.
And i have some troubles with OS stability with this product on openSuSe.
I rolled back to the old beta version.
Finally!
We have waited way too long for this. I already accepted that Skype for Linux is dead and buried. Thanks for proving me wrong.
Hi there, I’ve apparently installed Skype for Linux (v4) but it doesn’t show on the Ubuntu menus/search anywhere (no shortcut to it in other words). Any ideas?
Thanks!
Version 4.0.0.8 was released today!
i cant hear my own voice if i want to call someone else,what i have to do???
Skype 4.0.0.8 don’t work in ubuntu 10.10 hic
New version of skype is broken in may ways:
1) Before i could insert newlines and send messages by using Ctrl-Enter and Enter, now it’s just either Enter to send a message with no obvious way to insert a newline or Enter for a newline and Ctrl-Enter to send.
But I Do want to be able to insert newlines and I Do want to be able to send messages just by Enter. Like it was in version 2.1
2) Either i have single chat window for all my chats with WM_WINDOW_ROLE attribute (with useless vertical-only recent chats tab) or I can have multiple chat windows without WM_WINDOW_ROLE attribute.
I’d like to be able to open several chat windows with WM_WINDOW_ROLE and tabs for them with active (not recent!) chats. Again – like it was in version 2.1, but with active tabs.
3) This new single-window chat view is inconsistent: I have to click a button to open/close pane on the right, but I have to drag to open/close that useless recent chat tab.
4) It uses 2% cpu just by sitting in background and doing nothing! And that’s high-end i7 we are speaking about.
5) Overall visual style is very inconsistent with how usual program in linux looks like. I understand that in MS world every program must looks different – cool, fancy and so on, but that’s Linux.
I think I’ll upgrade back to pre-Skype Linux 2.2.
Skype 4.0 works fine for me, just like 2.2 and all the other versions did for me before. I guess I’m lucky
However, what I wanted to say is: please, please, PLEASE don’t make S4L’s interface more the way it is on other systems. I really appreciate the small contact list window. Just now I upgraded to 5.8 on my Mac from 2.8 (due to screen sharing not working on Lion any more) and I really don’t like it. Much bigger window, cluttered, encouraging me to make it even bigger (and the UI froze as I was trying to resize it). Went back to 2.8 very quickly.
Skype 4 is verry good version.
In my opinion its much better than 2.2.
Im heppy that dev team is still working, and im waiting for skype 5 with multi video support.
in Skype 4.0.0.8 (Ubuntu 12.04 i386), is not showing cash on account – it’s show in webpage and in mobile version, it was in show in Skype version 2.x (latest). But currently i have 0.00 (and there is some cash )
Hi,
Works fine under Ubuntu 12.04, 64 bit, except one quite annoying issue: if I get a call, and I respond it, the call does not start but hangs. I can call back the one that called, but it is quite annoying. I have ALSA sound system on (removed Pulseaudio since it was not working under Skype 2.x.
Any ideas about this possible bug?
Thanks
@esaxon: I suggest to restore PulseAudio, 4.0 has some problems with Alsa and USB headsets, see:
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCL-871
Just…thank you!!!
why not add this trick by default to solve camera issue:
_____________________________________
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Skype
Comment=Skype Internet Telephony
Exec=/sbin/skype_preload
Icon=skype.png
Terminal=0
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Categories=Network;Application;
________________________________
#!/bin/bash
export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l1compat.so
exec skype
No more multiple instances?
On Linux I always use 2 instances of skype, business and private.
With 4.0 there are no more multiple instances possible any more?
As a paying customer, I would like this feature back!
@lars.radtke
see: https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCL-860
Oh and the uberfeature I would like to see:
A menu option that shows me actual amount of clients logged in.
Thank you guys.
Congrats Marco and all Skype Team! Finally a beautiful and useful software!
I need advice,how do I hide the Skype Call window to tray in Kubuntu,because if I click X,conversation ends,and the conversation icon in taskbar really annoys me,and interferes with my activities…
For the missing dialpad issue I created a bug report: https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCL-874
thanks
and a minor annoyance
I am using 6 monitors, skype runs on the upper right one, but every new windows opens on the upper left one. Would be appreciated if any dialog window would start on the actual monitor where the mouse or client list is. (Use skype4pidgin anyway)
Hi Marco,
thank you and your team for this very nice new version.
I think you did a great job with the new interface.
It is not as bloated as the windows version and users can still choose to use the old interface if they want to.
But for me the new interface is working nicely, especially with the ‘pop-out/in’ of individual chats (most people probably haven’t even found this)…
As for stability, I cannot complain, but then again I never had issues with that in the older versions.
Cheers,
Dorian
framework in the next version will have the last skype has windows interface and integration with facebook I think it would be more just to be level in all platforms I hope your answer thanks.
Thank you! Version 4.0.0.8 works fine on Ubuntu 11.04.
Hi,
We had horrible problems with 4.0.0.8 on Ubuntu 12.04 on a 32-bit platform using a MS Life-Cam VX-5000
The Picture-in-Picture (embedded video) caused rapid flashing of the Skype video window: eventually after a few minutes causing the entire machine to lock up – mouse and keyboard – requiring a hard restart.
Pretty bad on a machine that has been stable for a couple of years and has worked it way up from Ubuntu 8. Surely it is bad practice to force an update without provision to roll back if it doesn’t work out.
We have manually reverted to the Static version of 2.2 which was completely stable for us, and have turned off (I hope) checking for updates on start up.
What a complete shambles: here is the download link –
http://download.skype.com/linux/skype_static-2.2.0.35.tar.bz2
Hi,
I would report problems in the ‘bug tracker’ if I could find it.
Where is the ‘bug tracker’?
Segmentation fault on launch – Skype
before i was using skype 2 with slitaz 4 and works well. today i plan to upgrade skype version and download Skype Dynamic version and extract it. but when i try to execute gives error “Segmentation fault”.
any idea about it?
Thiw version was long expected but it really was a big disappointment for me.
I’m running Kubuntu 12.04 LTS 32bit.
I have installed the .deb package (i know its for 10.04) and had a sign in failure every time i tried to connect (the proof for inserting the right password is this comment)
Then I’ve tried the dynamic version, which yield the same response.
Eventualy I’ve used the static version to find out that the situation remained unchanged.
@gtsarouchas
Are you behind a VPN? Because there is an issue reported by users where Skype cannot sign-in when behind it.
plz ignore my last msg.
It was a permitions problem on the file system that it was keeping skype from writting on the .Skype folder
Thank you
I get to this post only now because only now I have been ambushed by Skype’s silent update. This is not nice, especially since the “check updates on startup box” was unchecked in my settings. Not that I necessarily want back, but an app should respect the wish of the computer owner. I want to retain ultimate control over what software and what version is running on my system to make sure it plays nice with the stuff that is critically important to me.
I am sure you did a lot of improvements under the hood, but I find the new user interface to be worse than the old one. Too much eye-candy for my taste. It eats up more display real estate to give me less information. A bit of digging into the preferences and I was able to shrink/hide some of the bloat away, but the video window is still a problem. Where can I get the good old version back?
@guardlight.yl and to all Ubuntu users:
there has been NO Skype’s silent update and 4.0 has been out for 1.5 months and not just few days. What you got is Canonical’s update of Skype package together with all the others updates.
To revert to an old version of the package check your package manager or install Synaptic.
@marco cimmino
not pay any attention to these people incredulous your work is top instead of thanking those who died skype linux not get to complain and criticize the UI when 80% of Linux users have a dream to skype windows interface look like children crying and my prayers hopefully equal GUI on all platforms is carried out is fair and dream of that day
we skype linux version 5.0
we skype linux version 5.0
we skype linux version 5.0
we skype linux version 5.0
we skype linux version 5.0
we skype linux version 5.0
we skype linux version 5.0
we skype linux version 5.0
please please please……..
“moldovanpatriot commented Thursday, Jun 14
Thank Microsoft. Keep moving”
Nice joke!
I’ve enjoyed so much Skype 4.0 that I decided to move permanently to Google Talk.
Skype isn’t what used to be.
Hi Marco!
I just have install Skype 4.0.0.8 and it have not video calls button. In “Options-Video devices” the camera is working good.
What’s a problem?
@dpl_skype
You need to establish a call first to be able to start video or set auto-start video option in Options->Video devices
Good new improvements. But I really need multiple instances, the –secondary switch. And the history in one place.
I have to downgrade (((
Works great for me – thanks
> lsb_release -ds; uname -mr
Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS
2.6.32-41-generic x86_64
> uname -a
Linux 2.6.32-41-generic #94-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 6 18:00:34 UTC 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Works great for me.
Dell Studio 1737, Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS, 2.6.32-41-generic x86_64.
Corrected a problem I had where I could not see the local webcam during a video call. I couldn’t see if I was in shot or not!
Just updated to skype 4.0.0.8 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32bit and now skype doesn’t go through the company proxy anymore. It’s a simple HTTP proxy that used to work flawlessly before.
Whether I put it explicitely in the network preferences or I leave it to skype itself to utomatically discover the proxy, it doesn’t work, whilst it used to before the update.
@Marco Cimmino
Thank you, Marco!
I was a little blind.
Skype team, please fix this bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/skype/+bug/754162
It’s still persists in Skype 4.x
Please, add the ability to have multiple chat windows [like 2.x versions] instead of a single one!
Thank you very much!
@magoafono – please before adding a comment would you at least _read_ the post and see that this is already available?
uname -a:
Linux hp-laptop 3.2.0-29-generic #46-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 27 17:03:23 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Kubuntu 12.04 – KDE 4.8.4 – Skype 4.0.0.8
I was having problems with sound in Skype, which were solved by just deleting the .pulse directory from my home folder. After rebooting I noticed that the PulseAudio daemon was running, so I set PulseAudio for all devices in Skype and now all is working fine.
Thanks for this superb product.
HTH
I was super excited when my update manager told me there was an update to Skype. I really was. It made my day.
Then I installed it. I immediately wanted to curl up in a ball and weep. Every single change to the UI was a step backward. And I do mean every SINGLE change, with the single exception of moving the default download directory into options. It always annoyed me that I had to be sent a file in order to be given the option to change the download directory. Other than that, though, everything was a disappointment. The new “conversation view” opens at about 150px tall. I can resize it, but the next one comes up just as tiny. The “Not Available” status, which I used all the time, is gone. Most of my contacts use Skype on Linux as well, so they were able to see that status. Something is wrong with the icon so it’s bigger than it should be, and doesn’t completely fit in the task bar. I found a 64-bit .deb for 2.2, but half my computers are still 32-bit, and are out of luck.
I want to keep using Skype. I really do. Many of my friends and contacts haven’t seen the light of Google Talk, so Skype is the only way I can get in touch with them. My little rant here wasn’t meant to be totally negative, even if it may have come off that way. I’m being completely serious when I say that every single aspect of the 2.x UI was perfect, and nothing needed to be changed. I simply can’t use Skype 4.
Still, at least it’s not Skype 5 for Windows.
@Marco Cimmino – Sorry Marco I just see the option! At least for me the caption is not very clear… (use default view)
Maybe useful to add “Multiple chat windows” or something like that to help user to choose the chat view?
Thank you
I havent read this entire blog because its massive. Some kind of sorting of the contents would be really helpful. Maybe a forum section on Skype 4 for Linux? Is there one?
My two pence is this: Skype as a phone application Needs to be able to ring on one sound card and chat on another. The fact that Skype 4 only exposes a single audio output stream to pulse audio, and that it only exposes it when a call comes in, shows that the Skype developers dont really understand Pulse audio.
I personally had to return to Skype 2.2 because Skype 4 doesnt work with my usb headphones (and I found out this is only the case when I set the riniging from my laptop and talk from my headphones. Why would anyone want a phone to ring in their headphones?)
Also, the other glaringly missing tool with skype is a pause button, for making calls that involve extensions, direct from the phone book. There have been hundreds of comments about this on the Skype forum, and no employee from Skype ever got involved. a “Platinum Member” tried to make an argument that the Skype telephony subsystem didnt support “pause”, but the members of the forum pointed out that since it is possible to dial the extension manually once the call is connected, the pause functionality could be implemented purely in the client application. At this point al response from “skype” people dried up. I dont understand the difficulty of implementing something like this. Its a few hours coding work. I also dont understand why such a hugely subscribed thread for something so obviously practical was ignored by Skype.
The basic Skype product, p2p telephony and audio encoding is amazing. The pricing is very good value, and I quite simply could not afford to run my business without Skype. So.. Thank you so much for your time and your company.
Regards,
ITOSDA
@itosda_tech_partner
1. notification stream not handled correctly is a bug, fixed in next release
2. pause/resume a call: hit H (Hold) when Call View is in focus. You can find this (and more) shortcut in the README file present under /usr/share/doc/skype/
@Marco and company: thank you for all your work keeping the Skype client for Linux moving forward! Much appreciated.
Skype 4.0.0.8 did not work for me (openSUSE 12.1 64-bit, Logitech QuickCam Ultra Vision SE Webcam via USB), no input sound (microphone), it freezes for a long time on the “Options” menu, and I don’t like the new GUI. Fortunately, I had saved the RPM and downgraded back to 2.2.0.35 which worked fine 99% of the time (a few crashes and few glitches selecting webcam microphone/video here and there).
Feel free to contact me. If you downgrade to Skype 2.2, the old version requires xorg-x11-libXv-32bit but the RPM doesn’t properly call it up, so you need to install that first.
I didn’t save the Skype 2.2 .deb file for my Xubuntu 10.04 laptop (did “aptitude clean”), so if anyone has that, please contact me, because I want it. The Ubuntu repositories are loaded with 4.0.0.8 now, so if I were to upgrade, I wouldn’t be able to back it down.
Great work!
Easy mode to use 2 instances of skype under Linux:
start the usual instance with the shortcut from desktop,with the current loged in user.
Open a terminal,switch to another user and open from there another instance of skype.
Further to my Aug 20 comment, I found a couple of .deb files for Skype 2.2.0.35, one of them with “Maverick” in the file name, which I would assume originated from the Ubuntu 10.10 repositories.