Kopete Skype

Note: This addon is no longer being developed because of incompatibility issues with Skype.

What is it?

It is protocol for Kopete. If you ever cursed that you can go away in Kopete with 8 protocols and for Skype, you have to make two more clicks, you want all your communication together in Kopete or you just prefer Kopete because it looks better, this can help you. This will add Skype support to Kopete.

However, it is only wrapper. This means, you need running Skype at that moment, but you can use it from Kopete. It is even possible to hide the Skype so it does not bother you. It uses DBus for accessing the Skype, so you will need it installed and running.

Features include

• Setting your Online status.
• Chatting, that can be configured to show all your communication, only chats you start in Kopete.
• Multi-user chats that allows you to communicate with more people at once and invite new people to chat (by dragging and dropping their icon into the chat window)
• Calls to talk to your friends.
• Adding, removing contacts.
• Blocking, authorizing and removing authorization from users.
• Starting scripts when someone calls you, the call starts and ends.
• Autostarting Skype when you try to log on and it is not found already running.

Known problems

• Conference calls are working a bit strange. If you are invited to a conference call, more dialogs appears, or only one person of the call is showed. However, you can freely talk, hang up the call, pause it and so on. It is just wrongly showed.
• It needs running Skype. However, it can start it when needed.
• Going offline in Skype causes the plugin not working properly. You have to close Skype manually and then you can log on again. Going offline in Kopete works, however.
• Messages does not appear instantly. They appear after they are delivered to the recipient, which may take a while if it is the first message in a long time, and even more time, if the other person is offline
• Requesting authorization is not possible, you have to do that from Skype.
• The plugin does not work with new versions of DBus. Skype itself does not support new versions of DBus. I'm still waiting for the new, promissed version that is said to support it. After all, Skype is not OpenSource, so I'm powerless here.
• Alsa works only in the newest beta of Skype. If you have problems with sound, upgrade Skype (not the plugin).
• Skype requires old DBus version. Mostly everything else requeires new versions and I found no version that would work together. The plugin requires rewrite to support the X11 messaging, which is supported by Skype beta. If anyone has the time, he can try.

Tips and Tricks

• It is possible to hide Skype. First, go to Skype configuration dialog. Then disable all notifications of incoming messages and calls (uncheck all the 'Popup chat window' options and these around). And you can configure it to start minimized. Another thing you can do is hiding it's icon in 'Configure System Tray' dialog (you can get there by clicking the small arrow on the left side of the system tray).
• You can start Skype on top of arts. First thing, disable session management for Skype (KDE Control enter, KDE Components, Session Manager and write 'skype' to line called 'Applications to be excluded from sessions'). In the configuration dialog of the account (Kopete, Settings, Configure, Accounts, double-click 'Skype') enable launching Skype (Launch tab, select 'When not running') and make sure that the command line starts with 'artsdsp'.
• If you have sound problems when running Skype with arts, you can use the scripts a bit. First, make sure Skype is not launched with artsdsp (the command line should not contain 'artsdsp'). Then, go to 'Calls tab' and enable 'Execute before call'. Then, find script called 'call_start' on your disk (it should be placed somewhere in your KDE directory/share/apps/kopete) and write it with the whole path into the line below. Then, check 'Execute after call' and 'Only for last call' and the same way, find script 'call_end' and write it there (it should be in the same directory). This will turn off all sounds when you start a call to allow Skype access the sound card and restore the sounds after the call ends. Or you can have a look at http://forum.skype.com/viewtopic.php?t=48195
• You may want to make Skype ringing to arts. You can use 'Execute on incoming call' and write there something like 'artsplay NAME_OF_THE_SOUND_YOU_WANT_TO_PLAY'

Download and installation

The preferred way to install this is installing a package from your distribution vendor. It is probably something like kdeextragear-addons or something very similar.
Another way is downloading and building source tarball "kdeextragear-addons.tar.bz2" from KDE. It can be found in the section for example on the ftp mirror in snapshots directory. It installs a bit more, but it is not that much.

Getting from SVN

This part is only for experienced users. If you do not understand a word here, just skip it.
You can get development version of the plugin from SVN. I recommend version tagged as stable, trunk usually contains a version that is not considered to be stable. Just get svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/extragear/addons. You can download this directory non-recursivelly and download kopete_skype subdirectory there. After this, run commands:

• make -f Makefile.cvs
• ./configure
• make

That will compile it for you. Now, you need to install it. Run 'make install' as root user in the addons directory. And it is all, now log out, in and kopete should find it for you.

First start problems

This is the list of things that most oftenly go wrong.

• Could not find DBus. Check, if you have file '~/.kde/env/dbus.sh' and it is executable. If not, you can get it here. You can make it executable by 'chmod +x dbus.sh'
• Could not find Skype. This can be caused by more things. First, check version of your Skype (Go to Skype, click Help and About). It should end with '_API'. If not, then you need to upgrade your Skype. I recommend using the one from tarball. (Dynamic binary).
  Another problem may be that it is started without '--use-session-dbus' flag. You should let this plugin launch the Skype automatically and exclude it from session management.

Author

Michal Vaner (Vorner)

Status

No known crashes at this moment, however, it is rather new and some features are still missing.

Feature Freeze:

14.12.2004

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