Yep yep, through hours of sheer boredom, I have decided to make a little...tutorial for the sake of those in the chatroom who think the whole tiny flash chat thing is annoying. This here is the most basic of basic IRC tutorials, so let's get ourselves started.
What is IRC?
Ah yes, you must forgive me for that one, I was getting ahead of myself. To make a tutorial on how to use IRC, one must first explain what IRC is.
IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat and is a form of militiaperson text-based chatting over the internet that has been around since 1988. Now, there's a history to IRC, but you don't care about it, trust me. All you need to know about the history of IRC is that it is a method for groups of people to chat on the internet and that it is the method that is used for the LordKaT Live! chatroom.
There is more to be explained with regards the concept of IRC in the technical level, and shockingly enough this line is a bone-jarringly bad segue into my next section.
Servers and Clients
Now, many of you understand the concept of clients and servers. Servers are the...servers, the entities that provide services to the clients, which connect to the server to...use services...look, all you need to understand that IRC is based on the idea that a person uses a client to connect to a specific server in order to join chatrooms (called "channels" on IRC) and chat.
The average user doesn't really need to worry about the server side of this little process, but this is not true for the client. As I oh-so-clunkily put it, you need to use an IRC client to connect to an IRC server.
There are many, many, many IRC clients in existence for just about every operating system that can access the internet, and there are even flash-based clients (such as the one used on the LordKaT live webpage) to can work on any operating system. Of course, these flash-based solutions generally lack the...polish of the OS-independent clients, and as such I will be explaining how to install a few of these clients and how to use them to connect to the LordKaT chatroom (as well as any other chatroom you might find on IRC)
This has been enough background, I reckon, so let's get to the meat of this article.
An Important Note
This tutorial covers the setup and use of IRC clients on Microsoft Windows 7 and Kubuntu Linux, the reasons for this are below:
As of May 2010, approximately 89% of computers in the world run a Microsoft operating system, of these, about 55% of these computers run XP, about 19% run Windows 7, and the remainder is split between the other MS operating systems. With these statistics, one would assume that the ideal system to write a tutorial on would be Windows XP. However, when the age of XP is taken into consideration, and the date at which MS stops supporting it coming closer, a newer operating system becomes the more ideal choice, as such, Windows 7 was chosen to be used in this tutorial.
As for the decision to include a Linux section in this tutorial:
The popularity of the various distributions of the Linux operating system has risen in the past few years, and more and more "non-techie" people are using it. The traditional logic of "They use Linux, they must know how to do "X" and configure "Y"" is gradually becoming more illogical, and as such the decision was made to include a Linux section in this tutorial. As for the choice in specific operating system, Kubuntu is an offshot of the Ubuntu operating system, which is one of the more widely used Linux operating systems. I simply prefer Kubuntu over Ubuntu. (for those more technically inclined who don't know the difference, Ubuntu uses the GNOME environment while Kubuntu uses the KDE environment; the OSes are otherwise identical)
And finally, as to the decision to NOT include a Mac OSX section in this tutorial:
I don't own a Mac, and I have no intention of spending two grand for a ugly computer running what is more or less a modified distribution of Unix. No offense to Mac users, of course, this is just my opinion on one particular brand of computers that use a proprietary operating system that makes it fairly impossible for those not willing to spend exorbitant amounts of money to use.
...my simmering anger aside, the only thing that will be different for OSX will be the installation process, and that is very easy on any OS, so you wouldn't be missing much.
So that little note delivered, let's move on to getting your first IRC client.
The Download
As I stated earlier, there are thousands upon thousands of IRC clients to use, there are many lists of clients for use, however, the two clients I will be using for this tutorial are mIRC and Quassel IRC.
mIRC is windows-only, and is shareware (...kinda, you're supposed to pay money to use it...but you can opt not to if you wish).
Quassel IRC has Windows, OSX, and Linux versions, and is free to use.
As stated before, aside from installation, the setting up of the actual clients remains the same for all operating systems. For the sake of clarity, I will be giving each of the two clients their own section and will put the installation process in a separate section.
For Windows users:
mIRC can be downloaded from: http://www.mirc.com/get.html
For Windows and OSX users:
Quassel IRC can be downloaded from: http://www.quassel-irc.org/downloads
Linux Users:
As you likely know, you don't install things the same way as OSX and Windows users, so obtaining the install file will be covered in the install section...which is right now....boosh!
The Install
I'm not going to go into depth on how to install things on Windows or OSX; you double click the installer file and follow the wizard. If you use OSX or Windows, or you know how to do things on Linux, skip this section.
Now, first things first, if you use Kubuntu, you likely already have Quassel installed (it's the default IRC client).
However, if you do not have it installed (you used one of the basic Kubuntu installs, or use something other than Kubutu), then the most...user-friendly way to install Quassel is to use your packet manager. For Kubuntu this will either be a program called Adept Packet Manager or KPackageKit. For Ubuntu and newer Debian releases, the package manager will be called Synaptic Package Manager. For other distros, consult your manual for the name of the package manager.
Using a manager is pretty self-explanatory, simply search for what you wish to install (in this case "Quassel"), check the box next to the "main" client, accept all the additional files needed for the install(there's only one, called quassel-data), and click whatever the "apply" button is in your manager.
Now, if you...just want to do it from a command line (then again...if you're calling a shell a command line...meh) for whatever reason...open up a shell window (Konsole in Kubuntu, gnome-terminal in Ubuntu), and type the following. (note, this line only works in the *buntu family of OSes)
sudo apt-get install quassel
Enter your admin password when prompted, and then type "Y" an press enter when given the y/n prompt.
After about 5 seconds or so (Quassel takes a really short time to install), it will be installed, and you can exit terminal, and start using the programs. Which leads to the next section.
Setting up Quassel IRC
As a note, there will be a small image gallery at the end of this section to illustrate the instructions.
When you first run Quassel, a wizard will appear to assist in the first setup of the client. Using this wizard is very recommended, otherwise you must set up the options manually from the options menu of the client.
We will be running through the wizard to set up the client in this tutorial.
On the first page of the wizard, read the introductory crap and then press next. On the following page, enter a "Name" in the name row (don't use your real name unless you want people to know your real name), then click the add button next to the dropbox below this. A dialog will pop up. All you need to provide is something for the "Nickname", then press okay. After this is done, press next. You will see a server dialog appear. In the "Network Name" section, you can name the network whatever you wish. What you put here does not matter in connection to the server. However, the next part of this dialog does matter.
I suppose this is a good time to talk about the server that LordKaT uses. The server name is GeekShed, and instead of having only one server, they spread users over multiple servers.
Where does this fit into the whole setup we're doing at the moment? Well, in this 2nd listbox area, you have to add the servers you want to use to connect to IRC. Now, I said the server's name is GeekShed, however, if you simply press "add" and add "GeekShed", nothing will happen. IRC servers are identified by urls, therefore, you must use a url to add them to a list. As I said before, GeekShed, like many networks, have multiple servers in different parts of the world, that all are interconnected (this is for the purpose of having redundancy if one of the servers goes down). Therefore, when you click "Add" on this dialog, and are prompted to enter a server, you must use one of the urls provided here: http://www.geekshed.net/servers/ (at least to use GeekShed). You don't need to worry about port numbers in this case, as the default (6667) is what GeekShed uses.
You can add as many servers as you wish, but in all honesty, you only need one. Also, if you desire to just use a random server every time you connect, you can replace any of the urls in the link above with "irc.GeekShed.net" and connect to a random server.
Either way you decide, after you add the server into the list box, go down to the "Join Channels" box and type "#lordkat" (this is the name of the chatroom used by LordKaT), and click Save and Connect.
And that's it, you'll now be connected to the IRC channel and automatically join the channel. Simply click on the channel name in the box on the left, and you are in the channel. Exiting out of the program exits out of the chat room.
So, Quassel is done, but in all honesty, Quassel is better for Mac and Linux users, mIRC is (in my opinion), the only choice for Windows users, so let's see how to set that up.
Image gallery
Setting Up mIRC
(like the Quassel section, there is an image gallery at the end of this section)
When you first run mIRC, after the initial dialog, you will see a dialog with "mIRC Options" as its title. On the main page, enter a Nickname, and an alternate, then click Servers in the list on the left. Click add, then add "irc.GeekShed.net" as the server, give the server a name, and leave everything else default.
The server will appear in the server list now, simply double click it and you will return to the first page. You can now click connect, and when the connection is finished, a dialog will pop up, asking you to select a channel. Type "#lordkat" in the box and click "Join", and you will be in the chatroom.
Hay, we're almost done with this little thing now. Only one more thing that's needed to cover the "basics"...
Image gallery
NickServ
Assuming you have a "set-in-stone" user name, and want to prevent other users from using it. To do this, you register it with the NickServ bot. To do this, simply log onto the server with the name you wish to register and type " /msg NickServ REGISTER password [email]", where password is whatever you wish for your password to be, and email is your email address. Follow the instructions in the email and your nick name will be registered. Whenever you log into the server using that name after this, you will be asked by the NickServ bot to "identify yourself", which means typing "/msg NickServ identify password", where password is your password. It is recommended that you switch windows to the "server window" (the one that says the name of the server), before you do this, to avoid saying your password in the middle of the chat if you mistype.
And that's it, all the basics you'd need to know if you want to use either mIRC or QuasselIRC client to connect LordKaT's chatroom. Meh, will probably do an xchat tut as well...but not the biggest xchat fan...
