skype

[drspastic]

any ideas how to install skype in a13 debian? i know its closed source so i cant compile it but is there a way to use the android binary?

[jwischka]

any ideas how to install skype in a13 debian? i know its closed source so i cant compile it but is there a way to use the android binary?

Short answer: no.

It's going to be a no-go unless they release an arm-specific version for Linux, which I'm guessing is highly unlikely.

[drspastic]

damnit microsoft clowns. 

[jwischka]

damnit microsoft clowns. 

Actually I'd expect you might get better support from Microsoft, esp. given the Surface RT, than you would from Skype proper.

The bottom line at the moment is that these boards are not really intended to be used as a full computing environment. Maybe if the Pi can catch on in the educational environment you'd see some sort of ARM Linux development, but I wouldn't expect it anytime soon. Most commercial companies are balancing real dollars against a variety of real things they need to do, and a project like "make Skype run on super low end hardware" is probably not going to be high on the priority list.

[drspastic]

i was kind of hoping the arm binarys for android could be tweaked to work. skype gave reasonable performance on my 500mhz arm phone, not sure what flavour arm it has, its a huwaei / vodafone smart 858 but recently all my friends on many platforms report skype quality is going down the pan. even seems worse on my old winmo phone. it seems an m$ thing to try all sorts of ways to get us to buy better faster hardware so we need the latest os. thinking back to the days of working on ICL mainframes and VAX mini, A13 is amazing performance that blows out the water computers that even 20 years ago were running entire countries and took up 2 floors of an office block. just wait till some bright spark builds a punched tape reader to fit uext.

[jwischka]

i was kind of hoping the arm binarys for android could be tweaked to work. skype gave reasonable performance on my 500mhz arm phone, not sure what flavour arm it has, its a huwaei / vodafone smart 858 but recently all my friends on many platforms report skype quality is going down the pan. even seems worse on my old winmo phone. it seems an m$ thing to try all sorts of ways to get us to buy better faster hardware so we need the latest os. thinking back to the days of working on ICL mainframes and VAX mini, A13 is amazing performance that blows out the water computers that even 20 years ago were running entire countries and took up 2 floors of an office block. just wait till some bright spark builds a punched tape reader to fit uext.

The main problem is that Android "binaries" really aren't - they all run in a Dalvik VM, so it's not really code that works on anything other than Android. You'd probably have just as good of a chance trying to get the Windows RT ARM Skype binaries to work (which is to say, you have no chance at all).