IT Gang - A place for tips and tricks

Since I installed my brand new Fedora 10 distribution a while ago I was unable to use Skype for more than just a chat engine. I had no sound and no recording device, so I was unable to call my friends. And since I am using Pidgin as a Yahoo Messenger replacement on Linux, which I am not really familiar (or fond on the other hand), I was getting a little frustrated of the silence and loneliness surrounding me.

Today I decided to fix this matter so I started searching for what to do to enable Skype sound. I found many threads, but none of which really fixed the issue. In the end, I started the plain old fashioned way of testing the configurations one by one to see which will work. And eventually, I did find the right one. I make a succesfull Skype test call to echo123 and also called one of my friends, Paul (thankx), to confirm that my "out-of-the-barrel" sounding is gone forever!

Please note that because of the many things I tried before getting this to work, I might miss something from this process. If this will not fix the Skype sound for you too, then what you can try is to remove the "Alsa to PulseAudio backend" (alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.0.18-2.fc10) rpm (I did it using the System->Administration->Add/Remove Software GUI tool, search for "alsa").

Ok, so I set my audio settings to look like the image below (System->Preferences->Hardware->Sound):



Then, in Skype Options (right click the tray icon, choose "Options", then in the left select "Sound devices") you should have something like below:



Again, this is not a general tutorial, guide or FAQ about how to enable Skype sound/mic, this is what worked for me and might also work for you. If you have problems, leave your comment and maybe we can sort it out for you too.