After a bit of playing with the sound setup on the laptop I’ve now gotten to a point where I can run skype alongside other users of the sound system (xmms and so on). I do this using the aoss script, which uses the aoss shared lib to intercept the open() call in the same way that the other “wrapper” apps for skype on linux do – and therein lies the problem. Using skype-rec-kraken works when skype is just run, but that causes problems with usage of the sound system! Running using aoss solves the sound system problem but stops skype-rec-kraken working as it doesn’t catch the ‘/dev/dsp’ open call (which has already been caught via libaoss). It’s annoying and after a quick look at the libaoss code I don’t see an easy way to make them play nicely together. It’s annoying that there isn’t an easy way to record via skype on linux, but then skype seems to have given up on it’s linux port.

It should be possible to use jackd, but I can’t seem to find enough docs about doing it that way at present.