I’ll keep this as informative. If your webcam works in ubuntu (I’m running the 8.10 RC atm, fantastic btw) under cheese but not with skype, I did a bit of digging and cheese uses v4l2 (the ‘new’ webcam api) which inherently screws up skype that uses v4l1.

So, its easy enough since i came across this post and after chasing up my own system locations (this guy must be on 64bit, but i didnt ask) dead easy, instead of in the terminal going

skype

UPDATE:25/4/9

After a fresh install  jaunty i discovered i was missing a step

Need to install lib32v4l-0 and lib32v4l-dev (i think the -dev is unnessary but i install them anyway)

look in your library directories (/usr/lib/ or /usr/lib32/) for v4l1compat.so,

eg “ find /usr/lib* -name ‘*v4lcompat.so’ “

# LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/v4l1compat.so skype

this, obv, preloads that library forcing skype to use teh right interface library.

If my explanation is wrong please correct me