For the past 2 years I have been playing around with Opensuse and lately I have felt confident enough to fully switch my whole computer from Windows Vista to Suse 11.1. I actually have been spending all of today migrating all of my information and programs over. Now the question now is why did I do this? Kinda funny I finally switch from Vista for a couple of reasons:
- Vista is such a memory hog and the 64 bit version doesn’t have enough 64 bit programs
- I was using the 32 bit version of vista and I have 4 GBs of memory and it was only reading 3 GBs.
- I feel now that suse 11.1 is the best version of suse released and KDE 4.1 is so nice (KDE 4.2 is a little unstable).
- Linux runs so smooth compared to WIndows and really knows how to use dual core and multi core processors.
- The Linux community is getting bigger and to find a solution to a problem is becoming more likely.
- And I finally got Skype 2.0 video to run without distorted images, lol.
Now the last one is what sealed the deal for me because Skype is a program that I use alot. Now after months of researching I can finally unveil how to get it working.
First off let me reveal my specs.
But the most important spec is my webcam which is a Sony VGP-VCC8. First thing first is getting the webcam detected by Linux which would be detected as video0. I’m using the Linux Kernel 2.6.27.19-3.2-defaultx86_64. There are two ways I know of to get this type of webcam working you can get Ricoh R5U870 Linux Driver and follow the instructions for compiling it or add the community repository for SUSE located in Yast for webcam drivers.
After adding this to your repository you will need to go to Yast > Software Management then install luvcview. After doing so open up the program luvcview. If you can view yourself pretty well on the screen, that means everything is good and we can proceed further, if not you go back to the website follow everything thoroughly and make sure you have your kernel headers installed from software management through Yast.
Moving on we now install Skype. After installing skype and creating account for ourselves or logging in we will go to options and proceed to video devices. You should see the Select video occupied by /dev/video0 and to the right of that see test.
Click on test if the image is distorted or blurry then you may proceed if everything is good then you are good!
If your lost with what is going on so far, I will take time out to explain. We have the webcam working properly on our computer because we saw our picture perfectly in luvcview. Now when we open up skype we see a distorted picture which means something is wrong with skype. Which means we need to configure skype correctly.
Now for the kicker
Go to /home/user_name/.Skype/user_name/config.xml
Open up the config file and input
<Video> <CaptureHeight>480</CaptureHeight> <CaptureWidth>640</CaptureWidth> </Video>
In between the <lib></lib> and close out skype and open again and you will see the problem fixed. Shaggy? It’s fixed and you don’t know why. The reason is that Skype for Linux 2.0 video works in a resolution of 640 by 480. So improper resolution is the problem with skype not displaying the video correctly it took me a few months to figure this out and after you reading this it will take you less than a day lol. Leave comments about what you think.
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