When a friend tried to upload some files via Skype to my PC it kept failing, Skype 2.1.0.47 for Ubuntu complained “can’t write to file” as soon as I accepted the upload.

Here’s the solution:

First, I created a world-writable directory

mkdir /home/nick/skype-uploads
chmod 777 /home/nick/skype-uploads

I opened the File Transfer dialog, clicked the sprocked icon and selected Change Default Download Directory.... After setting that directory to my fresh skype-uploads dir uploads worked!

After copying a presentation from my laptop to my desktop box (which’s running OpenOffice.org 3.1.1) the embedded AVI videos didn’t show up anymore. The error message: “The format of the selected file is not supported.” It turned out that the JRE was missing gstreamer.

The solution

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras