A fresh install of my laptop with Ubuntu 7.10 after stuff just didn’t work causes pains sometimes of the installed programs. Skype being one of them.

Goto Skype for Linux and get the Ubuntu installer.

I needed some dependencies.

$ su -
$ apt-get install libqt4-gui libqt4-core
$ dpkg -i skype-debian_1.4.0.118-1_i386.deb
$ exit
$ skype

Voila, all my old preferences (from ~) work just nicely. I see it’s also a newer version.