installing skype on 64 bit fedora core 6

The skype download from http://www.skype.com/intl/en/download/skype/linux/ assumes that Fedora is 32bit.

For a 64 bit install and if you do not want to download the standalone version and move files to the various directories (which I think is too complex and difficult to maintain), you can download the required 32 bit rpm from the following site. http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/6/i386/

nas-1.9-1.fc6.i386.rpm
libsigc++20-2.0.17-2.i386.rpm
qt4-4.3.2-1.fc6.i386.rpm
qt4-x11-4.3.2-1.fc6.i386.rpm

Simply in similar order (nas is a pre-requisite for qt4-x11)

rpm -ivh nas-1.9-1.fc6.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh libsigc++20-2.0.17-2.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh qt4-4.3.2-1.fc6.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh qt4-x11-4.3.2-1.fc6.i386.rpm

After you have done this, rpm -ivh the Skype RPM downloaded from the skype site. I used -nodeps initially, but with the required RPMs, you should not have to do this.

MSI P35 Platinum and Adaptec 19160 SCSI cards

I've just upgraded my PC. Upgrades tend to be a bit tricky as mostly its trying to merge old with new.

One of my prized old parts is my old Adaptec PCI SCSI adapter which runs my SCSI drive. Instead of using the SCSI drive as a dedicated music disk like previously, I thought about using as my boot disk for Windows XP. I also had 2 x 320 GB SATA drives which I wanted to use as raid 0 data disk.

The problem with this drive setup was when XP was installed and booted, it never detected the 2 x SATA drives in raid mode. I also noticed in BIOS mode, the raid adapter configuration screen (Ctrl-"I") never appeared.

After moments of rebooting, I caught a glimpse of a line that said, "not enough space...". Hitting the Ctrl-A key during booting of the SCSI card, I disabled the SCSI bios and selected to not boot Bios and still scan SCSI bus to detect hard drives.

And it worked, but only boots from the Intel SATA raid drives.

Now I am forced to use Vista because Vista already has raid drivers in-built and XP needs a floppy on install and I was too lazy to carnage another box for that reason. No floppy drive works for me.

Here are the components of the new machine:

MSI P35 Platinum with Intel Core 2 E6550
Gigabyte 2600XT 256 DDR4
2 x 1 GB 800 mhz DDR2
1 x Adaptec SCSI 19160 U160 card
1 x 73GB SCSI HDD
2 x 320GB Western Digital SATA drives
Antec Sonata II case


Vista Performance 5.2 with the Intel Core 2 E6550 being the slowest at 5.2. Howszat!