As we all know, Skype is the most popular platform to connect people through their computer systems. You can freely connect to anyone all around the world through text, voice, and video calls. You can also choose to call people on their telephones but that will not be free. Since Skype is such a useful utility, we will explain how you can install it on your Ubuntu system in as many ways as we could find.
In this article, we will show you how to install Skype on an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system both through the command line and the graphical user interface.
Install Sykpe Through Ubuntu Software (GUI)
For a person who does not want to open the Command Line much, installing a software present in the Ubuntu repository through the UI is very simple. On your Ubuntu desktop Activities toolbar, click the Ubuntu Software icon.
Click the search icon and enter Skype in the search bar. The search results will list the Skype entry as follows:
Click the Skype entry from the search results. The following dialog will appear:
Click the Install button to begin the installation process. The following authentication dialog will display for you to provide the authentication details for a root user as only an authorized user can install a software on Ubuntu.
Enter your password and click the Authenticate button. After that, the installation process will begin, displaying a progress bar as follows.
Skype will then be installed to your system and you will get the following message after successful installation:
Through the above dialog, you can choose to directly launch Skype and even Remove is immediately for whatever reason.
You can launch Skype any time you want by entering Skype in Ubuntu Dash or access it from the Applications list.
Install Skype through the Command Line
You can install Skype through the command line by following a few very simple commands. We are presenting two options for you to install Skype here:
- Install the Skype snap
- Install Skype from the official website
Install the Skype Snap
Open your Ubuntu command line, the Terminal, either through the Dash or by pressing the Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut. Enter the following command in order to refresh the list of available packages:
$ sudo apt-get update
Since the Snap daemon comes by default in the latest versions of Ubuntu, we do not need to install it. If you are using an older version, you can use the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install snapd
Now type in the following command in order to install Skype Classic version:
$ sudo snap install skype --classic
The Skype Snap will be successfully installed on your system and you can launch it through the Dash or through the Applications list.
Install from the Skype website
The official Skype website contains many standard Skype packages depending on your needs and system specifications.
Here we will describe downloading and installing a Skype package depending on the Ubuntu flavor you are using.
Step1: Check if you have an Ubuntu 32-bit or 64-bit system
There are different versions of Skype available for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Ubuntu. In order to check which version you are using so that you can install the appropriate version of Skype, please follow these steps:
1. Open the Terminal either through Ubuntu Dash or the Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut.
2. Use the following command to fetch CPU details from the files sysfs and /proc/cpuinfo:
$ lscpu
This command will display the following output:
The CPU op-mode(s) entry tells you about the flavor of Ubuntu you are running on your system; 32-bit means you are running a 32-bit Linux OS, 32-bit, 64-bit signifies that you are running a 64-bit OS.
Step2: Enable MutliArch for a 64-bit system
Use the following command to enable multiarch in order to achieve better compatibility for programs on your 64-bit Ubuntu system.
$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
Step3: Download Skype .deb package from the Skype website
Enter the following command in order to download the Skype package to your system:
$ wget https://repo.skype.com/latest/skypeforlinux-64.deb
Packages downloaded through the wget command are usually saved in your Home folder.
Step4: Install the downloaded package
Let us first install the gdebi utility that will help us in installing the downloaded .deb package as follows:
$ sudo apt-get install gdebi
Enter the following command in order to download the Skype package through gdebi:
$ sudo gdebi skypeforlinux-64.deb
Please Enter y when prompted with a y/n option for installation after which Skype will be successfully installed on your system.
Now you can easily use this popular communication utility on your system. As you have seen, installing Skype is simple both through the command line and the Ubuntu Software utility. Luckily, this software is part of official Ubuntu Repository and also available on Snap and the official Skype website for you to install.