How to use headless Skype over DBUS on Debian

I installed Skype on Debian and ran it headless, however, I cannot interact with it over dbus.

Some context of what I have so far:

• Installed Debian 6 on VMware fusion box from netinst CD
• Skype version is 2.2.0.25 dynamic
• DBus version is 1.2.24, installed it with apt-get install dbus
• Skype seems to be running fine in headless mode

What seems odd:

• When starting Skype with Skype --enable-dbus --use-system-dbus it shows warning Skype: unrecognized option '--enable-dbus'

Now when I try to send some messages to Skype over dbus with this:

dbus-send --system --type=method_call --print-reply --dest=com.Skype.API /com/Skype com.Skype.API.Invoke string:NAME\ hello  string:PROTOCOL\ 5 string:SET\ PROFILE\ RICH_MOOD_TEXT\ echo123

It ends up with error message:

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name com.Skype.API was not provided by any .service files

When it comes to dbus, I'm new to it. As far as I understand, there should be some files under /etc/dbus-1/session.d|system.d but these directories are empty.

Solution 1:

Install Ubuntu dependencies needed to run headless Skype.

SSH into your server as a root or do sudo -i.

Then install necessary software:

apt-get update
apt-get install -y xvfb fluxbox x11vnc dbus libasound2 libqt4-dbus libqt4-network libqtcore4 libqtgui4 libxss1 libpython2.7 libqt4-xml libaudio2 libmng1 fontconfig liblcms1 lib32stdc++6 lib32asound2 ia32-libs libc6-i386 lib32gcc1 nano python-virtualenv
wget 
# if there are other unresolved dependencies install missing packages using apt-get install and then install the skype deb package again
dpkg -i skype-linux-beta.deb