IRC Quick Start

This page is intended to help newcomers to IRC.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a form of real-time communication in which you can chat with lots of people in the internet. Its been around for a long time, and its very simple to use.

The freenode IRC network is a chat network that hosts lots of channels about FOSS technology, in which you can get support, talk to developers or just hang around with people. Our #projectpier channel is hosted at freenode servers.

You need an IRC client to connect an IRC server. The IRC server contains several channels, in which you can participate and chat, usually divided by topic. Once you have connected to the network, you can ask for help and other specific stuff to the users in the channels, for advanced features (called IRC Services), like nickname registering, private messaging and etc.

The information needed is the server address "chat.freenode.net" and channel name "#projectpier". If you have a configured IRC client clicking on this link may open the #projectpier channel

Once you've downloaded a client, and configured the IRC server and channel you want to join, or just the server, you can join other channels later ("/join #projectpier", for example), all you need to do is connect and start chatting. Be sure to respect the channel rules, which may vary from channel to channel and network to network. Check our channel guidelines in the guidelines page.

Here you can find more info about freenode on the web: http://freenode.net
Curious about channels, statistics, etc? http://irc.netsplit.de

Clients

To connect to Freenode, you need an irc client. Here are some popular picks:

Pidgin (http://www.pidgin.im/) and Kopete (http://kopete.kde.org/), being multi-protocol chat clients are also able of connecting to IRC.

Another popular one is Chatzilla, available in lots of platforms, and its a good first choice:
https://addons.mozilla.org/pt-PT/firefox/addon/16
http://chatzilla.hacksrus.com/

In Windows:

http://chatzilla.hacksrus.com/
http://www.silverex.org/ (Free XChat)
http://www.mirc.com

In Linux:

Keep in mind that they are usually already bundled in your favourite distribution, so no need to download from their site, but you can go there and check the documentation.
konversation for KDE: http://konversation.kde.org/
Kvirc for KDE: http://www.kvirc.net/
xchat in GTK: http://www.xchat.org/
irssi in text mode: http://www.irssi.org

In Mac:

Colloquy: http://colloquy.info/
Xirc: http://www.aquaticx.com/