[Courses] Basic guide to IRC and ircii

[Sonja Krause-Harder]

> I am new to using IRC, and hence I'm not really sure how to set up so I
> can be a part of the linuxchix chatroom whenever there is one.  Any help
> will be great...I'm trying out the Visual IRC.

I do not know Visual IRC, but here's the Basic Survival Guide to ircii:

ircii is a pure textual interface to IRC (which is text-only anyway).
Graphical IRC clients may be more comfortable, but a basic set of
textually given commands works in all clients (... I have encountered
so far). ircii comes with an extensive set of help files, which may
have to be installed separately. On SuSE, the packages are named
ircii and irciihlp, both in n (networking stuff). On other distributions,
I do not know, but they tend to have some kind of index ;-).
If you consider installing from source, you don't need the kind of help
I try to give here.

** Starting ircii and connecting to a server

On the command line, type:

	$ irc <nick> linuxchix.org:6667

Replace <nick> with some nickname you like. The ":6667" part specifies the 
port number to connect on, 6667 is the default, so you can leave that out. 
On busy servers, you might want to connect to some other port, anything 
between 6660 and 6670 is pretty common, just try. linuxchix.org is _not_ 
busy at the moment, so you don't need that right now anyway.

If all goes well, you soon see some text from the irc server (what it is called,
its uptime, how many clients are connected) and some form of greeting text
("Welcome to the IRC Server at Sime~Gen Online" in our case). Have a quick
glance at the screen now - the second-to-last line is inverted (if your
terminal is black on white, this one will be white on black) and shows some
status information. The last line is where you type, and everything above is
where the chat will happen soon.

If you see something about not being able to connect, you might be behind
a firewall that doesn't allow outgoing connections on port 6667. In this case,
you can't use ircii (ask on the list for some WebIRC solution, I'm pretty
much clueless regarding these).

That said, I will assume from now on that you have successfully connected.

** Personal information / privacy

Any command or special action in ircii (and IRC in general) starts with a '/'
(forward slash, no quotes). For starters, just type

	/whois <nick>

in ircii, where <nick> is the same nickname you used above. The
server shows you what it knows about you. You can get this kind of information
about any nickname you encounter on IRC with the /whois command, and everybody 
else gets this information about you. Depending on how your account on the 
machine where ircii is running is set up, you might see your real name here. 
If you're not comfortable with that, quit ircii by typing

	/quit

You now have your command line back. To change the text ircii is showing in
your /whois, type (assuming bash as your shell):

	$ export IRCNAME='I read the survival guide!'

(you may, of course, type anything you want between the single quotes).
Start ircii again, by typing

	$ irc <nick> linuxchix.org

on the command line, and check with

	/whois <nick>

(As a side note, I've been on IRC with my real name for about 2 years now.
I've met many people kindly warning me about not using my real name and 
telling me there were bad guys on the internet. I've never met a bad guy. 
So you probably won't be molested immediately when you forget to set 
$IRCNAME either, however, I still think you should know how to stay 
anonymous, if you want to.)

** Channels

Ready to meet the others? Conversation on IRC mostly happens in channels.
When you are on a channel, everything you type can be read by everyone
else who is also on that channel. Channels have names, which (for our
purposes) are always prefixed with a '#' sign. To join a channel, type

	/join #<channelname>

(On linuxchix.org, the only channel I've seen so far is #c. Maybe #newchix
would be nice to have as well for those who want to get used to IRC and
get some help. What do you think?)

If the channel you specify after /join doesn't exist, the server creates it
for you.

To see who else is on that channel, type

	/names #<channelname>

or

	/who #<channelname>

where the latter gives you more detailed information.

In channel discussions, every line starts with the nick of the person saying
that, as in:

	<skh> Hi there.

You will also notice lines like

	* skh is doing something

This magic it is done by the command /me. I would have produced the line
above by typing:

	/me is doing something

To leave the channel, type

	/part #<channelname>

or, if you want to sign off completely,

	/quit

** Messages

Apart from talking to the whole channel, you can also talk to a person
directly. To do this, type

	/msg <othernick> <message>

So me typing

	/msg <yournick> Hi, this is a message.

would show up on your screen, and only yours, like this:

	*skh* Hi, this is a message.

(Where I come from, it is considered polite to initiate private discussions
with
 
	/msg <othernick> *knocks on the door*

or something equivalent, and not insisting further when there's no reaction.
Sometimes people are busy, or not even at their desk. This need not apply
to the whole IRC universe, though.)

** Getting help

With this information you should be able to get over your first IRC session
without too much embarassment or panic attacks. If you have installed the
ircii help files, typing

	/help newuser

gives you some additional information to get you started,

	/help <command>

displays the help text for a given command, and

	/help

gives you a list of commands on which help is available.

-- see ya on IRC

Sonja

(I post this to grrls-only and courses, as there were questions about
IRC on both lists. If you find this text useful, feel free to forward
it, but please remove the references to linuxchix.org in the text.
Thanks.)