How to Install Skype for Linux Beta on Debian 9 Stretch – LinuxBabe.Com

Skype for Linux beta 5.3 was released on May 31, 2017. It is a proprietary software, built on the web-based Skype client. This tutorial is going to show you how to install Skype on Debian 9 Stretch via the official Skype Linux client repository.

What’s new in Skype for Linux beta 5.3:

• Use ‘libsecret’ instead of ‘gnome-keyring’ in order to store your credentials
• Fetch large contact lists by page
• Bugfixes and improvements

For open-source and privacy-concerned users, the Wire app is a good alternative, but there are many people who for some reason can’t quit Skype.

How to Install Skype for Linux Beta on Debian 9 Stretch

We can install Skype on Debian 9 Stretch from the official Skype Linux client repository. Please note that Skype for Linux beta currently only works on 64-bit system. 32-bit users can send a request in Skype community.

So here’s how to install it. Open up a terminal window and switch to root.

su -

Run the following command to add Skype Linux client repository to Debian 9 Stretch system.

echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://repo.skype.com/deb stable main" |  tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/skype-stable.list

Then use the following two commands to fetch and install Skype public key so that APT package manager can verify the integrity of downloaded packages from this repo.

wget https://repo.skype.com/data/SKYPE-GPG-KEY 

apt-key add SKYPE-GPG-KEY

Since this repo is using HTTPS protocol, so we also need to install the apt-transport-https package.

apt install apt-transport-https

Now all left to do is to update our software source and install skypeforlinux package, which is around 50 MB of size.

apt update

apt install skypeforlinux

Once installed, you can start Skype for Linux beta from application menu or use the command below.

skypeforlinux