Problems With Logitech Communicator STX Webcam on Ubuntu 9.10 & Skype 2.1

Tough two weeks until I got them all play together nicely. Now they do. How come? Why did it take so long? There are many tutorials out there solving the problem by making Skype use Linux for Video version 1 drivers instead of version 2, which it does not seem to like. It boils down to the following lines:

Create a file in /usr/local/bin/skype and insert

#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype

finally, make it executable by sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/skype

Use this file to start Skype from now on. Done.

But not for me. Skype refused to eat it: “ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.”

Until I finally found this one here — and **** yes, I searched, read and tried a lot of nice forum entries.

Just to cut a long story short, here is why: all the other solutions work for 32bit Linux only – but hey, I do not have any potential of my laptop to waste – I am running Kubuntu 9.10 64bit. And with a minor tweak, the fix will work for you, too.

Get this. sudo apt-get install lib32v4l-0

And change /usr/local/bin/skype to LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype

Its just about the “32″. **** **!

Thanks Eoin Murphy.