Debugging Skype crash problems on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Linux

Posted on July 16, 2010  by Mikko Ohtamaa
Filed Under linux, technology, ubuntu
Tags: bug tracker, crash, linux, log files, skype

Symptoms: Your Skype crashes on incoming chat message or if you try to open a contact info / chat message – usually this leads to a crash on Skype start-up because there are always incoming chat messages in a queue.

Skype is not really helpful regarding how to get meaningful log information from the client, but it is possible.

Create a log directory

mkdir ~/.Skype/Logs

Run Skype from the command line and open a chat window so that it crashes

moo@murskaamo:~$ skype
Aborted

Now there should be log data available

moo@murskaamo:~$ ls -lh ~/.Skype/Logs/
total 724K
-rw-r--r-- 1 moo moo 607K 2010-07-16 11:10 skype_20100716-1110.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 moo moo 116K 2010-07-16 11:10 skype_20100716-1110.trace.txt

However, those log files are little useful for anybody except Skype developers as they are encrypted. Your only hope is to submit them to  a Skype bug tracker and hope that someone answers you something meaningful. The guidelines how to create a bug report and how they are processed is little unclear – there doesn’t seem to be clear announcement from Skype whether they process  these reports or not.

The crashes probably are due to incompatible system library versions / bugs in them. Try downloading static Skype versions which does not use system libraries.

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