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

• Irssi is populer with the screen users
• X-Chat is populer with the point and click croud.

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/.