By Jeff Alami
Online chat is one of the biggest wastes of time I’ve ever had
the fortune to experience. You start up your chat client, you get a
few people in a channel, and you sit around. An occasional joke
followed by “LOL’s” and “ROTFL’s” is bound to happen. A remarkable
trait of online chat is that you can never stay on the same topic
for very long, especially not your intended topic. It’s just like
business meetings, except you could be in pajamas and no one would
care.
How about chatting online with everyone’s favourite OS? Linux
offers a multitude of chat clients, including dozens of different
chat clients to keep you going all day (and all night long), typing
away to your heart’s content. So, when you feel like
procrastinating on your projects, find a chat client you like, and
start wasting time right away!
Internet Relay Chat (or IRC for short) is one the most popular
ways to chat on the Internet. Using a protocol separate from what’s
used for the World Wide Web (all under TCP/IP, of course), the IRC
protocol is particularly suited for chatting. IRC-specific clients
were developed, the most popular being mIRC for the Windows
platform.
On Linux, one of the first IRC clients was ircII. ircII is a
console client that was followed by another console client known as
BitchX. Since then, a proliferation of X11-based graphical IRC
clients have appeared; some of these new IRC clients are integrated
with desktop environments such as GNOME or KDE.
These new IRC clients include Bezerk, an IRC client written with
the Gtk+ toolkit; cIRCus, one of the first
graphical IRC clients; Irrsi, a Gtk+-based IRC
client that can use the GNOME panel; tkirc, a graphical front-end
to ircII using Tcl/Tk and Expect; X-Chat, a powerful IRC client
that is well integrated with GNOME; yagIRC, which stands for
“yet another GTK+ IRC client”; and Zircon a Tcl/Tk IRC
client.
A few IRC clients have been integrated into the K Desktop
Environment, using some of KDE’s libraries. These IRC clients
include keirc, KSirc, and KVirc.
Once you got your IRC client of choice, there are a few places
you’d want to check out. First, there’s the Open Projects network;
you can connect to irc.openprojects.net or irc.linpeople.org, and
join the various Linux and Open Source channels. Additionally, the
EFnet and Undernet networks have a #linux channel where many Linux
people hang out. Also, SlashNET (at irc.slashdot.org) is a place
where fellow Slashdotter can rant about current events and
stories.
Copyright
(C) 1999 Zeta Publications. (Reproduced from Bleeding Edge Magazine)