Getting Skype to work on Debian Etch

I was having some trouble getting the new skype 2.0 to work on my system for testing. I downloaded the package from http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-deb and downloaded file was skype-debian_2.0.0.63-1_i386.deb.

Double clicking on the file just opened up gdebi which closed again.

Running from the terminal, gdebi crashes with the following error.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/gdebi”, line 31, in ?
if not debi.open(sys.argv[1]):
File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.4/GDebi/GDebiCli.py”, line 31, in open
if not self._deb.checkDeb():
File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.4/GDebi/DebPackage.py”, line 185, in checkDeb
if arch != “all” and arch != apt_pkg.CPU:
AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘CPU’

A bit of research later, figured it was a problem with the python libraries and found this patch at debian.org.

It simply involves opening /var/lib/python-support/python2.4/GDebi/DebPackage.py

and replacing the line in the #check arch section

if arch != “all” and arch != apt_pkg.CPU:

with
if arch != “all” and arch != apt_pkg.Config["APT::Architecture"]:

Skype now installs without any trouble.