There are times when I wonder how I ever survived without Knoppix as a tool for fixing PC problems on the fly. And give someone a CD and some basic instructions, and you can soon have a live terminal up ready to fix a whole host of problems. Yet I find being able to talk to the person on the other end often vital for solving problems, and more importantly, it can be a reassurance for when you make a cock up!
Normally I just install the latest version of Skype, sadly however the latest Skype 1.4 beta doesn’t work on Knoppix 5.1.1, and owing to legal issues previous versions have been pulled and replaced. Skype are prevented them hosting these prior releases, which meant I had to dig around a bit before I could find a copy of Skype 1.3, packaged for Ubuntu. Download this .deb package, and then run the usual command as root:
dpkg -i skype_debian-1.3.0.53-1_i386.deb
Voilà!