old blog,

A little hack to get a working Skype RPM with less painful PulseAudio support

Izhar Firdaus Izhar Firdaus Follow Support Apr 24, 2008 · 1 min read
A little hack to get a working Skype RPM with less painful PulseAudio support
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This is almost a very old news I presume, nonetheless, I just noticed it today while wasting my time jumping to random Open Source project sites.

It is well known that skype and pulseaudio doesn't play well together. Skype's ALSA implementation doesn't really implement all of the standard ALSA API which caused alsa-plugins-pulse to not work with skype. Fortunately, as stated in PulseAudio Perfect Setup page, the skype static OSS (Open Sound System - another sound standard, different than ALSA) package can be used to work around this issue through padsp.

However, the skype_static-oss package come in a tarball, of which, is ugly/inconvenient to certain people (like me). So, I've hacked together a spec to repackage that binary blob and make Skype almost JustWorks for Fedora. I don't know what Skype's regulation for redistribution of their binaries, so, to be safe, I can only provide you the RPM spec file.

Here is the spec file : skype_static-oss.spec.

Just put the skype_static-oss tarball in your rpmbuild SOURCES directory, and invoke rpmbuild -bb with the spec file. Install the generated rpm and use it as you would normally.

For those who are not familiar with rpmbuild, heres a little script to get you going


# as root
yum install rpmdevtools

# as user
rpmdev-setuptree
cd ~/rpmbuild/SPEC
wget http://izhar.fedorapeople.org/misc/skype_static-oss.spec
spectool -R -g -A skype_static-oss.spec
rpmbuild -bb skype_static-oss.spec

# ... wait ... wait ... wait
# grab the generated RPM
# rpm -ivh (the generated rpm)
# enjoy~



Oh btw, the spec is under WTFPL. Just do wtf you want with it.
Written by Izhar Firdaus Follow Support
I'm a system architect, data engineer and developer advocate with passion in Free / Open Source software, entrepreneurship, community building, education and martial art. I take enjoyment in bridging and bringing together different FOSS technologies to help businesses and organizations utilize IT infrastructure to aid and optimize their business and organizational process.

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