SKYPE 2.x on Linux:

After a lot of digging around, I hit on the brilliant idea of running skype from command line so that U can atleast get a look at the error messages-if there are any. Voila; it turned out that there was just one - could not open libasound_module_ctl_pulse.so

More digging to find out the package that it was present in gave me alsa-plugins-pulseaudio as the package that contains the file. Cool I thought-I downloaded it from rpmfind and tried to install it when it said that it is already installed :D OK Back to square 1. More digging and I found the solution-uninstall the very same package. Yes it did it. Just do a
yum remove alsa-plugins-pulseaudio and you should get skype 2 working cool with excellent audio and the video-ok I have not tested that. My friend whos webcam I was trying to see was having a bad connection and probably a bad cam. So cant really comment on that.

But in addition to removing alsa-plugins-pulseaudio, I installed alsa-plugins-oss and made my system->preferences->hardware->sound point to OSS devices. If you have trouble with just the above, then you could try doing this step in addition....good luck :)