2 A Brief Introduction to IRC

IRC is global, distributed, real-time chat system that operates over the Internet. An IRC network consists of a set of interconnected servers. Once a user is connected to an IRC server, he can converse with users connected to any server in the IRC network. IRC provides for group communication, via named channels, as well as personal communication through ``private'' messages. For more information about IRC, including available client software and public IRC networks, please see The IRC Prelude (irchelp.org).

If you have not used IRC before, you may want to try it out to get a feel for what it is. For a quick start, log in to an Andrew machine, and run irc <nickname> irc.debian.org where <nickname> is the nickname you want to use. Then type /join #c<cr> to join the C programming channel. Other channels you might be interested include #debian, #redhat, #perl, #Linux, and #c++. After you have tried out the text mode IRC client, you may want to try out more elaborate clients, such as chatzilla (part of mozilla).