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I am a novice, using Ubuntu 14,04. I have tried to install Skype, and it does not work. I need it installed, but I read all the suggestions, and they all refer to using some sudo commands in what I believe is a DOS-like command prompt menu - and I cannot find anywhere to access that?

I am sure this is a trivial question thousands have asked before, so a simple direction to where this is explained would suffice for me as help.

I also realize that I need to know what "distribution" my Ubuntu is, and if is 32 or 64 bit - where do I find that information?

Thank you in advance.

David
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Mogens Eliasen
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1 Answers1

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To open the DOS-like terminal, press Ctrl+Alt+T all together on your keyboard to open the terminal.

From the terminal prompt to find out what your distribution is, type in the following:

cat /etc/*release

it will produce text looking like this:

terrance@terrance-ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/*release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=14.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=trusty
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS"
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="14.04.3 LTS, Trusty Tahr"
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS"
VERSION_ID="14.04"
HOME_URL="http://www.ubuntu.com/"
SUPPORT_URL="http://help.ubuntu.com/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/"

To find out if it is 32bit or 64bit, type in:

getconf LONG_BIT

Example:

terrance@terrance-ubuntu:~$ getconf LONG_BIT
64

Then to install Skype, type in the following:

sudo apt-get install skype

When sudo is used in front of the command, it is running at an elevated permission level, so it will ask for your password to continue to install the application.

To add a Desktop icon of skype, type in the following to copy one to your desktop, then make it executable.

cp /usr/share/applications/skype.desktop ~/Desktop/
chmod +x ~/Desktop/skype.desktop

Hope this helps!

Terrance
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