This is a quick note about how to get Skype URLs to open in Skype. This is not about opening web URLs from inside of Skype chats.

The problem:
When I have a link to a URI that uses "skype:" as the protocol, it creates a warning about needing to run xdg-open with the protocol. xdg-open then hands the URI to Kopete instead of to Skype. I saw the behavior in both Firefox and Chrome.

Translated:
I click on a link expecting it to open Skype for a chat, voice call, or video call. Instead it is opening KDE's chat client Kopete. The first few letters of the address, which would normally say "http", say "skype".

Reason:
KDE has defined Kopete as the handler for the Skype protocol in /usr/share/kde4/services/skype.protocol

Solution:
Copy that file to ~/.kde/share/services/skype.protocol, and edit the "exec" line to change the reference from "kopete" to "skype". I had to log out and back in for the change to be applied.

Nothing I did with the KDE File Associations wizard, keditfiletype, ~/.local/share/applications, update-desktop-database, xdg-mime, or ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list made any difference.

I found this is necessary to use the BlueJeans conferencing service from my Debian Mint Linux Edition box. I'm running Debian Testing (Jessie just after the release of Wheezy, so they are still very similar) with KDE 4.8.4. This fix applied to Skype for Linux 4.1 and 4.2.