What's IRC

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time 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. On IRC you can talk to many other members.

Though a channel might have many people in it at any time, they might not always be in front of the computer, if no one responds, just wait a little bit and you may get responded.

How to use it

Choose clients

The following is just a list of programs that you can use to enter the channels listed below.

• Empathy - Default instant messaging software on Ubuntu since Karmic.
• Smuxi - A cross-platform and user-friendly IRC client for GNOME.
• Pidgin - Popular instant messaging software that also supports IRC.
• XChat - GUI based IRC client.
• HexChat - The fully open source successor to XChat. Particularly good in terms of bugfixes, but there are some new features too.
• ChatZilla - A Firefox add-on or as a part of SeaMonkey.
• freenode online - A online client.
• LimeChat - An open source IRC client for macOS.
• Textual - Popular commercial application for interacting with IRC chatrooms on macOS.

Registration(Optional)

Some of the IRC channels allow to use an account without registration, but in order to use the IRC service on a continued basis, registering your own account is strongly recommended. That will give you a unique IRC identity, and will also allow you to access channels where unregistered users have been locked out for technical reasons.

Please follow the steps for registration:

1. Pick a nickname you like. Set it using the command

/nick your_nickname

Note: If that nickname is already taken, you should try setting a different one.

2. Pick a decent password, and use a real, valid email address that you have access to.

/msg nickserv register your_password your@email.address

3. Check your mail. You should have a new message from freenode, with a command that you should copy and paste into IRC. Do that.

4. From now on, when connecting to freenode, you should identify using the command.

/msg nickserv identify your_nickname your_chosen_password

If you don't want to have to do this, you can set your password as the server password; how this is done depends on your IRC client.

Join a channel

You are able to join a channel after getting connected to a server, the community uses freenode as the server node. Simply run a single command to join the channel.

/join #channel_name

Please refer to website https://openeuler.org/en/community/irc.html for the list of community.

Commands

Use /help to get a list on all available commands (/help help is a good start). Replace nick by any IRCNICK.

• /nick IRC-mini-HOWTO changes your IRCNICK to IRC-mini-HOWTO
• /msg nick Hi. sends a private message to nick containing Hi.
• /join #nick-name. join the #nick-name channel.

Please refer to https://kiwiirc.com/docs/client/commands for more commands.