Skype

Skype (http://www.skype.com) is a software that lets you make phone calls through Internet and your PC. It is gaining more and more popularity due to its good voice quality and the fact it is available for many platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS, Windows Mobile). It allows you, once you have bought some credit, to call landline phones all over the world at a very cheap rate.

What is even more interesting is that you can call another skype user that is online completely for free, WITHOUT HAVING TO BUY ANY CREDIT. And it lets you have conference calls with up to 5 people. This last feature makes it particularly interesting for scientific purposes, as it let you organize conference calls all over the world for free.

On most linux sissa PC you can find it installed, in the menu Applications-Internet. To use it you need to have an account, that you can open for free, and obviously to know the skype ids of your correspondents. Let's see a step by step procedure. If it is not installed you can ask the helpdesk to install it, specifying the hostname of your computer.

As you launch skype you find yourself in front of this dialog:

You need to choose an username that is easy to associate with you, that is longer than 6 letter and doesn't contain any space. You need to choose also a password. Usually it is not a good idea to have the same password everywhere. Keep in mind that in case you lose it, you can ask it to be mailed to you. Another thing to note is that you won't be able to continue unless you accept the end user license agreement and terms of service.

Going on you can find the following dialog:

Here you can enter some personal data. Inserting the email and the country is compulsory. Putting other infos is up to you, whether you prefer to guard your privacy or to be easily found by colleagues. After this dialog your account will be createdand you will be logged in. After that all you need is to know the skype ids of some colleages. You can directly ask them or try to find them using the menu Tools-Search for skype users.

To test everything the easiest way is to place a call out to “echo123” that is skype official call testing service. You should hear a voice explaining you how to test the sistem. If the test fails, or worse if you are unable to perform it, here it is a quick checklist:

1. check the microphone and headphones connection. Usually the microfone jack is pink and the headphone jack is green or they have some meaningful symbols printed on. They must match the connectors on your pc
2. check the mixer volume settings: to hear something the master and PCM volumes must be unmuted and to a reasonable volume, to be able to record you need to check the microphone isn't muted, and sometimes the volume of a “capture” channel must be raised.
3. on older linux system, a problem may occur if two programs try to access the sound hardware simultaneously. Please stop any sound playing software or sometimes even the flash plugin of the internet browser

You can install by yourself skype on your laptop. Simply go to http://www.skype.com/download/ and choose the right version for your operating system.

The Windows version and the MacOs version have usually more features than the Linux version, such as video calling.

One thing must be kept in mind. Skype uses a peer to peer protocol, that means that sometimes you can find yourself acting as a server for other people on the internet. So it is critical to keep the software up to date, particularly for the windows version of the software.