Installing SKYPE on RHEL/CentOS 7

UPDATE:- Microsoft has pulled the plug on Skype 4.10, so this tutorial will no longer work. Install the latest skype version from the article  HERE .

Skype is famous app that is used for instant messaging & making video calls online. We can also share pictures, videos, text files etc over skype. Skype also supports video conferencing calls. In this tutorial, we are going to install Skype on our RHEL/CentOS 7 servers.

We will be using two methods to install skpye on our system,

1. Using rpm file
2. Using source file

Using RPM file

This method is the simplest of the two methods and have been tested on both RHEL/CentOS 7 . This method requires us to download the rpm file & install it. But before installing skype rpm, we need to remove some of the dependencies for the skpye package.

To remove dependencies for the rpm package , run

This will install all the dependencies, now we will install the skype package by running,

This command will download and install the skype package. To run skype on the machine, run following command in the terminal,

When running first time, this command will launch a windows where you need to approve the terms & conditions, after which you will asked for your skype id and password.

Using source file

This method is a bit difficult & requires you to compile the package from the source code but its useful in cases where the above method does not work. Firstly remove all the dependencies that are required by skype, by running,

Once installed, we will now download & extract the source file of skype,

We now need to create a launch file for the skype with the following content,

Also provide the launch file with the execute permissions,

Lastly we need to create some important symbolic links for the files,

After making all these changes, we can now use our software by opening terminal & typing

This concludes our tutorial on installing skype on CentOS/RHEL 7 machine. Please feel free to mention any query in the comment box below.