IRC
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of realtime Internet chat. It is mainly designed for group (many-to-many) communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message.
Many people stay logged on to IRC for many days. It's best to ask your questions even if you think people are not around.
Channels
- #freegeek is the main channel, which is used by most freegeek internet people.
- Other channels are some times created for special topics. and example would be the now defunct #freegeek-distro
Tools
There are many IRC clients, these are the ones I see around
Here are several, popular in the OpenSource community,
(Some with ports to many other platforms)
Included with many Linux Distributions.
- Kopete : http://kopete.kde.org
- GAIM : http://gaim.sourceforge.net/
- BitchX: http://www.bitchx.com/
Popular clients for Windows platform:
- GAIM : http://gaim.sourceforge.net/
- mIRC : http://www.mirc.org/news.html
- More information on IRC can be found on the web, for instance at http://www.irchelp.org/.