Running Skype for Fedora x86 in Fedora x86_64

After I installed Fedora 16 x86_64, i needed to install manually Skype for linux, which is available from This link, as it is not in Fedora repositories. After clicking the Skype icon from the kickstart menu, the Skype icon kept bouncing. Skype for linux is not available for 64 bit fedora (till now), and therefore requires 32 bit libraries to run. Problems …

Problem 1 – libXss.so.1 missing

First step, I launched konsole, and executed skype to get the error messgae, which was as follows:

[phoxis@localhost ~]$ skype
skype: error while loading shared libraries: libXss.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Skype needs the 32 bit libXss.so.1 library, therefore copying the /usr/lib64/libXss.so.1 will not help, which is already installed.

Solution Step 1

I searched in yum for the library file and got a matching package, libXScrnSaver.i686, and installed it.

[root@localhost phoxis]# yum search libXss
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
========================================================================= N/S Matched: libXss ==========================================================================
libXScrnSaver.i686 : X.Org X11 libXss runtime library
libXScrnSaver.x86_64 : X.Org X11 libXss runtime library

[root@localhost skype-2.2.0.35]# yum install libXScrnSaver.i686

Problem 2 – libQtDBus.so.4 missing

Next attempt to start skype shot another error message:

$ skype
skype: error while loading shared libraries: libQtDBus.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Solution 2

First i located the file libQtDBus.so.4 in my system and knew that they were 64 bit versions, so i would need the same package for the 32 bit version, and so extracted the package name to which this file belongs with rpm -qf

[phoxis@localhost ~]$ locate libQtDBus
/usr/lib64/libQtDBus.prl
/usr/lib64/libQtDBus.so
/usr/lib64/libQtDBus.so.4
/usr/lib64/libQtDBus.so.4.8
/usr/lib64/libQtDBus.so.4.8.0
/usr/lib64/libQtDBus_debug.so

[phoxis@localhost ~]$ rpm -qf /usr/lib64/libQtDBus.prl
qt-devel-4.8.0-7.fc16.x86_64

Next to install the 32 bit version of the package:

[root@localhost phoxis]# yum search qt-devel
        .
        .
        .
qt-devel.i686 : Development files for the Qt toolkit
qt-devel.x86_64 : Development files for the Qt toolkit
        .
        .

[root@localhost phoxis]# yum install qt-devel.i686

After the package and its dependencies were installed again I ran skype and the results are as follows.

[phoxis@localhost ~]$ skype

Success.

If any other library is needed in your system the thing you need to do is to simply install the 32 bit version of that library in your system from the repository, so that Sykpe can use it.