skype problem

[jiml8]

My system: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2 mobo, 32 GB RAM (I run lots of virtual machines), Phenom-II 955 processor, all modestly overclocked.

Skype worked fine on 64 bit Mageia 2. I upgraded to Mageia 3, and lost skype. Figured out about enabling 32 bit repositories, did so, then was able to install skype and it again worked. At a slightly later point, I issued urpmi --upgrade-all and it upgraded...many things.

Now, skype is broken again. Message is:

Code: Select all

/usr/bin/skype: line 2:  9067 Segmentation fault      LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so /usr/share/skype/skype

I can give you an strace output if you want.

I'm not offline; skype works fine in most of my virtual machines...at least, those where I've installed it...but I would prefer to run it out of the host if I can. There is something vaguely perverse about running skype out of my Windows 7 Pro virtual machine, when I have a perfectly good linux host available.

[sander85]

Does it work if you run it w/o v4l2convert.so?

Instead of running skype, run /usr/share/skype/skype

[jiml8]

No, I already investigated that. Just running the skype executable directly gives a segfault with no other message.

[doktor5000]

If you rename your ~/.Skype/ folder temporarily, does it start afterwards?

[jiml8]

Code: Select all

jiml@localhost:jiml> mv .Skype .Skypehold
jiml@localhost:jiml> skype
/usr/bin/skype: line 2: 10575 Segmentation fault      LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so /usr/share/skype/skype
jiml@localhost:jiml> /usr/share/skype/skype
Segmentation fault
jiml@localhost:jiml>


*sigh*

[doktor5000]

Can you upload the strace output here as an attachment please?

Apart from that, please have a look at one the first threads here about Skype starting with viewtopic.php?p=4516#p4516 and our MAQeia for Skype viewtopic.php?f=36&t=1121 maybe you'll find a hint there.

[jiml8]

Command was:

(strace skype) &> straceoutput.txt

result is:

straceoutput.txt

(9.65 KiB) Downloaded 90 times

Command was:

(strace /usr/share/skype/skype) &> straceoutput2.txt

result is:

straceoutput2.txt

(45.87 KiB) Downloaded 95 times

I also tried running gdb on it, but there are no symbols and the backtrace was useless, only returning an error in glib:

Code: Select all

gdb /usr/share/skype/skype
GNU gdb (GDB) 7.5.1-7.mga3 (Mageia release 3)
Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-mageia-linux-gnu".
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>...
Reading symbols from /usr/share/skype/skype...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
(gdb) run
Starting program: /usr/share/skype/skype
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
Using host libthread_db library "/lib64/libthread_db.so.1".

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x0807b0e8 in realloc@plt ()
Missing separate debuginfos, use: debuginfo-install get-skype-4.1.0.20-2.mga3.nonfree.noarch
(gdb) backtrace
#0  0x0807b0e8 in realloc@plt ()
(gdb) quit
A debugging session is active.

        Inferior 1 [process 23858] will be killed.

Quit anyway? (y or n) y

edit: upon review, I see that /usr/lib64/libthread_db.so.1 is being used. Should this be /usr/lib//libthread_db.so.1 ? Or is it just gdb that is using that...

[doktor5000]

(strace skype) &> straceoutput.txt
(strace /usr/share/skype/skype) &> straceoutput2.txt

In any case, i'd use the output facility of strace, and also consider forks. So i'd do a

Code: Select all

strace -f skype -o output.txt

See, less typing and now stderr/stdin redirections required

Anyways, the traces don't tell that much :/
In the german forum one user had a similar problem, in his case it was probably a broken
Nvidia driver installation, as he used the upstream installer and not the Mageia packages.
Could also have been the webcam, but he never replied back

Are you using any special stuff on your system - like Kerberos, as it seems from the second trace, or something like Bumblebee?

Normally i'd suggest to report this as a bug to Skype, but seems their bugtracker closed down long ago :/
You could try their forum though: http://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/bd-p/Linux
And you could try to pull a log: https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA1232 ... -log-files

[jiml8]

Output facility of strace does not work; leaves empty output file. This is why I used redirection.

In any event, the command:

(strace -f skype) &> straceoutput3.txt
yields:

straceoutput3.txt

(65.34 KiB) Downloaded 85 times

Which does indeed show the SIGSEV, as the result of an lseek(3, 0, SEEK_SET) where 3 was successfully opened as /proc/self/maps

[doktor5000]

Well, now you only need to find out why Skype gets confused looking at it's own process attributes

Did you have a look at the second part of my last post, i've added some information there.
Also the thread linked to before, viewtopic.php?p=4697#p4697 has some more information.
You could try with an older version of Skype, if the problem still occurs.

[jiml8]

Actually, I am using the Nvidia driver from the Nvidia website, rather than the packaged one. Reasons for this are ancient and historical, and I am not sure they apply any longer but it has gotten to be a habit to do it that way.

And I have observed that after some updates (other than kernel updates) with Mageia, I DO have to recompile the driver because portions of the installation get changed. So perhaps the problem is there someplace.

However, Skype did work briefly in this installation, until I did that urpmi --update-all. And it worked with the Nvidia driver I compiled from their website.

On Mandriva 2010 I used a copy of Skype that was statically linked and available from their website because the dynamically linked variants all required libraries that were not available for Mandriva 2010 (too old). I can no longer find that version on their site, but if I root around in my archives here, I'm sure I'll come up with a copy...

[jiml8]

I keep a copy of my last version of Mandriva 2010 32 bit handy just because every now and then I encounter a configuration issue with the current system that is solved in that old installation.

So, I rooted around in it and came up with the version of skype that I was last using in that system. Apparently this is not the static version; when I started it, it immediately complained about a missing libtiff.so.4. So, a quick symlink to the available libtiff.so.5 got it running. So I have skype again. Not the best solution, but a workable one.

[doktor5000]

Okay, you could also send Barry Jackson a PM, he seems to have some of the older versions available.

For the nvidia driver, you may want to use http://onse.fi/nvidia-mgabuild/
If you use the dkms packages, there shouldn't be any problems with updates, but should make sure
to install kernel-flavour-latest and kernel-flavour-devel-latest metapackages to keep kernel updates and -devel packages in sync.

[barjac]

I have these static tarballs:- (and also the corresponding dyn builds)
skype_static-2.1.0.47.tar.bz2
skype_static-2.1.0.81.tar.bz2
skype_static-2.2.0.35.tar.bz2
P.M. me if you need them.

[kammerer]

'Dynamic' package 4.2.0.11 from skype.com works for me

[doktor5000]

No need to get that from skype.com as we have that packaged, look at our MAQeia: viewtopic.php?f=36&t=1121

[mgkiwi]

Thank you Mageia team!
I had Skype working from when I installed Mageia 3 until a while ago, on my 64-bit machine. But when I tried it recently, all seemed ok, but every time I tried to call, I got 'Call failed', and my contacts saw me as offline when I'd set online. I'd checked all the solutions in viewtopic.php?f=36&t=1121, uninstalled and reinstalled with MCC, still no luck. Our netbook with 32-bit Mageia succeeded in making a call, so it wasn't the router or network settings.
Then I found this post, and tried renaming ~/.Skype - instant success.

No idea what had changed between my last successful Skype call, whenever that was, and now, but I'm happy to have it working again!

[doktor5000]

Actually that's listed also in MAQeia since the start:

Skype immediately crashes on startup
There are multiple reasons for this.

[...]

Also a broken or old user profile could be the reason. Please try the following as user to fix this:

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mv ~/.Skype ~./Skype-old

Then try to start Skype again in a terminal, and see what error it gives.

[mgkiwi]

So it is - thank you. I'd missed it because my Skype didn't crash, it seemed perfectly fine except that it wouldn't connect any calls.