So it was when I was trying to install Skype on my brand new Debian 7 (Wheezy) when I encountered this problem:

package architecture (i386) does not match system (amd64)

Actually I was a little shocked. I just downloaded the Skype package for Debian from the official website then tried to install it normally using “dpkg -i ”, and it used to always work (normally). Actually I came from the rpm world (Fedora and CentOS) and have been only using Windows 8 for the past few months for my thesis, so I am actually wondering whether I’m the one who is a little out of date, or this is just a deb thingie, or I’m just too thick and dumb. But really, I never encountered this kind of problem. This is a first for me.

So after googling for a while, I found the way to install Skype from the official website of Debian. One interesting sentence, which I noted was:

From Wheezy onwards, Debian supports Multi-Arch. The Skype packages for i386 works well with Multi-Arch.

I never heard the term “Multi-Arch” before. It seems like it’s an architecture which supplies the system with multiple version of the binaries, which I think is very cool. The prerequisite is that the debian-package must be “Multi-Arch”-aware, and I think Skype is “Multi-Arch”-aware, because I saw that term when I was downloading the package.

So here’s a the command to install Skype on 64-bit Debian Wheezy. It’s mostly the same as the one in the official website of Debian. I just added the “sudo” and the “apt-get upgrade”.

# add the i386 architecture support
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

# update the package list
sudo apt-get update

# upgrade them
sudo apt-get upgrade

# install the skype deb package, you will get dependency error
sudo dpkg -i /Path/To/Your/Downloaded/Skype/Package.deb

# fix the dependency error
sudo apt-get -f install