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. It turned out that the JRE was missing gstreamer.

The solution

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras