Upgrading to Skype 4.3 on Linux

Today Skype failed to log me in on one of my Fedora Linux laptops.  That, I guess, is a part of the force upgrade to Skype 4.3.  While doing so, I came across two issues:

  1. Download Skype page is broken in Google Chrome.  After choosing the Linux distribution nothing happens.  Switching to Firefox helps.
  2. The new, upgraded Skype crashes about 2 seconds after a successful login.  When started from the command line, a simple Aborted message is displayed.  Nothing more.  (Maybe because I have core dumps disabled).  After a bit of Googling around, all you need to do is rename your ~/.Skype/ folder into something else and restart Skype.  This will lose your history, some settings, and edited contact names.  But the Skype will work and your contacs will still show up in correct groups.

No “thank you” to you, Microsoft.  Huge thank you to you, Google.  Once again you saved the day.

5 thoughts on “Upgrading to Skype 4.3 on Linux”


  1. Renaming of ~/.Skype/ folder into something else does not work :(
    After that I still have a message “Aborted”.


  2. I have just found that skype 4.3 uses SSE2 and my CPU does not serve this instruction, so it is probably the real issue :(
    Here are last lines of command:
    objdump -d /usr/lib/skype/skype
    where you can see that skype 4.3 uses SSE2
    http://pastebin.com/zKbu6CG9

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