Filling my Technological Void|Learning to Adapt to new Technology…… The Hard Way.

There are sometimes that you need to get help from a live person or those Google searches aren’t doing you any good at all. In such a case your best bet is to try the Ubuntu IRC community for help. If you remember my first post about Ubuntu I mentioned about the community being a huge plus. Well if you enter the Ubuntu channel you can see that theres quite a few folks always there. To be frank, I’ve never seen the channel have any lesser than 1000 people in the channel . Now lets see on how we can use IRC to get some help.

First of all you will need an IRC client program to be able to use the IRC channels. I chose XChat cause it seemed simple and not hard to configure or understand. Although Ubuntu comes with Pidgin which can handle IRC I don’t like using Pidgin for some reason. If you prefer a command line interface client then you can use IRSSI. To install XChat you would use the following command.
sudo apt-get install xchat
Now you will be able to access the program from the menu Applications > Internet > XChat IRC. Once you open the program you should get the following Window.

Lets go over those boxes one by one. First the Nickname is the ID that you will be using to chat through IRC. The Second and third choices are just other nicknames you can use in case for some reason the first/second ID cannot be used. Enter something in the real name and user name box. Now if you are just going to use IRC for Ubuntu support you can select the network as Ubuntu servers and then connect. That should place you directly in the #Ubuntu Channel. Personally I join the #Freenode Servers so I can choose whether or not I want to open #Ubuntu (I’m on a crippled broadband connection which only allows data transfers of 1 GB after that I have to pay by the MB and since there’s alot of traffic in #Ubuntu keeping it open a while hurts on my daily average of internet usage). If you choose the Freenode Server then on connecting you should get a screen which looks like the following. (Off Topic: For Digit users the channel name is #Digit) .

Here if you type in #Ubuntu it should take you to the Ubuntu Channel in IRC and you should see something similar to this.

As you see theres quite a few people in there and it is pretty busy which is definitely a good thing. The more active people and the better chance you have on clearing your doubts. Now there are some basic things you should do before you even ask a question here.

• Read the topic very well. You will be amazed at how many people come in and paste the output of an error message which is about 20 lines long and spans across 30 different lines. Paste the contents to one of the websites like www.paste.ubuntu-nl.org or www.pastebin.com .
• Follow the basic internet Chat etiquette and don’t start off “BY POSTING QUESTIONS LIKE THIS” or like this “yo, Ih4×0r3d my 00bunt00 d|5tr0 n0w | can’t b00t!” I’m sure that post would make a baby cry and so will it get you a kick from the channel.
• You can secretly ask common questions to the bot in the channel “ubotu” who has alot of information stored in him. To do this just type /msg ubotu <insert one word subject here> . An example would be /msg ubotu flash. now if you look at your XChat screen you should see that you have a private message from ubotu saying this “<ubotu> To install Flash see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/Flash - Flash 9 is now available in dapper-backports and edgy-backports - See also !Restricted and !Gnash
  <ubotu> The Flash plugin installation is currently broken. This is due to Adobe changing the tar file that the package downloads. See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=636397 if you need to fix this immediately, but it’s recommended to wait for an official fix. “
• Wait for an answer and do not post the question every 10 seconds in the channel.

Theres quite a few of guidelines you will need to follow and I’m sure you will find them out over time if you spend about 30 minutes in UBuntu’s IRC channel you definitely will learn it. have fun in IRC.