Installing Skype on Debian Testing

I just went through the classical painful process of dist-upgrading my Debian Testing on the laptop. The main reason to do so is that I wanted to install Skype, which I hadn’t installed before on this machine, and it wasn’t playing ball with the dependencies. So I went ahead, dist-upgraded and almost all the dependencies for Skype seemed to be fixed, but one:

dpkg: problemas de dependencias impiden la configuración de skype:i386:
skype:i386 depende de libssl1.0.0; sin embargo:
El paquete `libssl1.0.0:i386' no está instalado.

(yes, my system is configured in Spanish)

So, since libssl1.0.0.:i386 doesn’t seem to exist now in the repositories, I was stuck with libsl1.0.0 for amd64 arch.

The solution was to force the installation ignoring dependencies:

dpkg --force-depends -i skype-install.deb

Surprisingly, it works without doing anything else.

Of course, this breaks the package system, but what is a Debian Testing system without a bit of fun?

An alternative, and probably better solution is to manually download the libssl packages for amd64 and i386 which don’t seem to be present in the repositories (Germany at least). Since the version must match, the version from the repositories for amd64 and the one from the packages website for i386 were not working for me.

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