How to make "good old" Skype 4.2 work
Today, while browsing bash.im (Russian QDB’s analog), I stumbled upon an interesing quote in the abyss:
03.09.14 13:25 #4403487 xxx: Сцуко.. skype 2.2 более не работает.. пришлось поставить Linux ABI для cos6, запихать skype 4.2.0.13 и пропатчить бинарь, чтобы он думал, что он 4.3.0.37…
It says that this person patched Skype 4.2.0.13 binary to make it think its version is 4.3.0.37. I thought, why not give it a try? And I did. And it worked! Had to find out how to patch binaries though, but that didn’t take much time.
And here’s the result: working SlackBuild for Skype 4.2! No more tainting your system with PulseAudio. This is not exaclty my SlackBuild, I just took the one from SlackBuilds.org, added a line for patching Skype binary, included the patch itself, changed versions and that’s it. But it works! I built Skype package using this SlackBuild and was able to sign in. The sound works, as far as I can tell. No problems so far.
Let’s hope Microsoft won’t close this opportunity to use the older version any time soon…