After a bit of digging I've found out how to make Skype detect the video input from my Webcam. The secret is to preload the v4l1compat.so library as shown on the Ubuntu Wiki:

bash -c 'LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype'

That does the trick for 32bit systems, and since there isn't a native Skype version for 64bit

mimir@orion:~$ file /usr/bin/skype
/usr/bin/skype: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.8, stripped

we need to tell skype to preload the 32bit version of the library like so:

bash -c 'LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype'

Now video works perfectly using Skype 2.1.0.47 under Ubuntu 9.10 64bit

Adobe FINALLY released a native 64bit Flash Player 10 plugin. Although this is still an alpha release, the news is very exciting for Linux users, since we don't longer depend on nspluginwrapper, which although does the job, has it's drawbacks.

I have put together a small tutorial on how to install the native flash player 10 64bit plugin for linux.

#!/bin/bash
# Script  created by
# Romeo-Adrian Cioaba romeo.cioaba@spotonearth.com

echo "Stopping any Firefox that might be running"
sudo killall -9 firefox

echo "Removing any other flash plugin previously installed:"
sudo apt-get remove -y --purge flashplugin-nonfree gnash gnash-common mozilla-plugin-gnash swfdec-mozilla libflashsupport nspluginwrapper
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f ~/.mozilla/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -rfd /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper

echo "Installing Flash Player 10"
cd ~
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.45.2.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
tar zxvf libflashplayer-10.0.45.2.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ 

echo "Linking the libraries so Firefox and apps depending on XULRunner (vuze, liferea, rsswol) can find it."
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so  /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/

# now doing some cleaning up:
sudo rm -rf libflashplayer.so
sudo rm -rf libflashplayer-10.0.45.2.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

You can now restart firefox

Some users seem to have problems with viewing this page, so i wrapped everything needed to install the native 64bit flash player on linux into a shell script. Grab the Ubuntu script here, chmod +x and execute it.

Thanks to Claudio de Taunay for providing a script that works in OpenSuSE 11. You can pick it up here.

Thanks to Homer Xing from the Ailurus project you can now install native flash player 64bit on Fedora. You can pick up the script here.

Let me know if you encounter any bugs.

the scripts to install in different distro:
Ubuntu: install native flash 64bit on Ubuntu

Fedora: install native flash 64bit on Fedora

OpenSuse: install native flash 64bit on OpenSuse

Here is a tutorial on how to install vuze on ubuntu 64bit.

1. Prepare install folder
mkdir ~/Applications

2. Download and extract Vuze
cd
wget http://cache2.vuze.com/files/Vuze_linux.tar.bz2
tar jxvf Vuze_linux.tar.bz2
mv vuze ~/Applications

3. Download and extract the latest 64bit SWT (you can get the latest URL from theEclipse SWT Project Page)
wget http://eclipse.ialto.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.4-200806172000/swt-3.4-gtk-linux-x86_64.zip
mkdir swt
mv swt-3.4-gtk-linux-x86_64.zip swt
unzip swt-3.4-gtk-linux-x86_64.zip
mv swt.jar ~/Applications/vuze/

4. Enjoy Vuze by starting it from terminal:
~/Applications/vuze/vuze

Adobe recently launched Flash Player 10 Beta codenamed "Astro". Great news, as it supports a bunch of new features, but as usually nothing yet for the 64 bit users. I'm going to show you how to get flash player 10 running on Ubuntu 64bit using nspluginwrapper. Before doing anything in the terminal make sure you close Firefox else you might not get the expected result.

1. Make sure you don't have any other flash plugin installed on your system:
sudo apt-get remove -y --purge flashplugin-nonfree gnash gnash-common mozilla-plugin-gnash swfdec-mozilla libflashsupport nspluginwrapper

1.1 To be sure we don't have any other old flash libs let's cleanup the folders where it usually resides:
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f ~/.mozilla/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -rfd /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper

2. Install ia32-libs and latest nspluginwrapper
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs nspluginwrapper

3. Download the latest flash player from Adobe Labs and extract it:
cd ~
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_install_linux_051508.tar.gz
tar zxvf flashplayer10_install_linux_051508.tar.gz
sudo cp install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
rm -rf ~/install_flash_player_10_linux/

4. Use nspluginwrapper to install the plugin and link it to firefox
sudo nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/

EDIT: here is how to install flash player 10 on 64bit systems for Liferea and Vuze

sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/

5. Start Firefox and type in the address bar about:plugins and press enter. You should get a result similar to this one:

6. Go to http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/index.html and test the new features.

EDIT: if you are lazy by nature, you can just grab install_flash_player_10_ubuntu64bit, a small script i put together. Make it executable (chmox +x install_flash_player_10_ubuntu64bit) and run it in terminal. It will kill ask you for root password the kill any Firefox you might have running and install the flash player 10

NOTE: for the new and improved script follow this URL: http://meandubuntu.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/flash-10-rc-on-ubuntu-amd64/