Skype on Linux systems never really seemed to be a first class citizen in Skype ecosystem. For years it was in beta, even now with 2.2 version it is still a beta version. Linux version didn’t get eye-candy Windows and OSX versions received, but it’s kind of OK. Maybe it’s just my personal experience, but I’ve experienced quite a lot of Skype problems during my years of Linux usage.

The most recent one is “P2P connect failed” when I attempted to log in. It have been a problem with my network or a problem with Skype servers, except it wasn’t, as on Windows machine it worked properly.

Searching for solutions on Google revealed, that it may be solved by removing whole ~/.Skype directory, but in such case you would be removing your whole history. That is not what we want, right?

The solution

The solution is very easy, you just need to remove 2 files: shared.lck and shared.xml **Make sure that Skype application is shut down before continuing. **Removing these two files can be done very easily, just run this command:

rm ~/.Skype/shared.*

That’s it! Launch Skype again and you should be greeted with “Terms and agreements” window, after which you should be able to log in.