install X-Chat to launch the X-Chat client, select X-Chat from Applications, Internet.
The X-Chat application enables you to assign yourself up to three nicknames. You can also specify your real name and your username. Because many people choose not to use their real names in IRC chat, you are free to enter any names you desire in any of the spaces provided. You can select multiple nicknames; you might be banned from an IRC channel under one name, and you could then rejoin using another. If this seems slightly juvenile to you, you are beginning to get an idea of the type of behavior on many IRC channels.
When you open the main X-Chat screen, a list of IRC servers appears, as shown in Figure 5.14. After you choose a server by double-clicking it, you can view a list of channels available on that server by choosing Window, List Window. The X-Chat Channel List window appears. In that window, you can choose to join channels featuring topics that interest you. To join a channel, you double-click it.
FIGURE 5.14 The main X-Chat screen presents a list of available public servers from which to select.
Do not be surprised at the number of lewd topics and the use of crude language on public IRC servers. For a humorous look at the topic of IRC cursing, see http://www.irc.org/fun_docs/nocuss.html. This site also offers some tips for maintaining IRC etiquette, which is essential if you do not want to be the object of any of that profanity! Here are some of the most important IRC etiquette rules:
> Do not use colored text, all-capitalized text, blinking text, or 'bells' (beeps caused by sending to a terminal).
> Show respect for others.
> Ignore people who act inappropriately.
After you select a channel, you can join in the conversation, which appears as onscreen text. The messages scroll down the screen as new messages appear.
You can establish your own IRC server even though Fedora does not provide one. Setting up a server is not a task for anyone who is not well versed in Linux or IRC. A popular server is IRCd, which you can obtain from ftp://ftp.irc.org/irc/server/. Before you download IRCd, look at the Read Me file to determine what files you need to down load and read the information athttp://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/ircd/.
Usenet Network Newsgroups
The concept of newsgroups revolutionized the way information was exchanged between people across a network. The Usenet network news system created a method for people to electronically communicate with large groups of people with similar interests. As you will see, many of the concepts of Usenet news are embodied in other forms of collaborative communication.
Usenet newsgroups act as a form of public bulletin board system. Any user can subscribe to individual newsgroups and send (or
Usenet newsgroups are divided into a hierarchy to make it easier to find individual news groups. The hierarchy levels are based on topics, such as computers, science, recreation, and social issues. Each newsgroup is named as a subset of the higher-level topic. For example, the newsgroup comp relates to all computer topics. The newsgroup comp.laptops relates to laptop computer issues. Often the hierarchy goes several layers deep. For example, the newsgroup comp.databases.oracle.server relates to Oracle server database issues.
The format of newsgroup articles follows the strict guidelines defined in the Internet standards document
The header lines identify information about when and by whom the article was posted. The body of the message should contain only standard ASCII text characters. No binary characters or files should be posted within news articles. To get around this restriction, binary files are converted to text data, through use of either the standard UNIX uuencode program or the newer
A collection of articles posted in response to a common topic is called a
The free news server news.gmane.org makes the Red Hat and Fedora mail lists avail able via newsgroups. It is a handy way to read threaded discussions and easier than using the Fedora mail list archives.
The protocol used to transfer newsgroup articles from one host to another is rfc-index.txt.) NNTP was designed as a simple client/server protocol that enables two hosts to exchange newsgroup articles in an efficient manner.
The Pan News Client Newsreader
Whether or not your Fedora server is set up as a news server, you can use a newsreader program to read newsgroup articles. The newsreader programs require just a connection to a news server. It does not matter whether the news server is on the same machine or is a remote news server on the other side of the world.
Several programs are available for UNIX systems to connect to news servers to read and post articles in newsgroups. Here we discuss the Pan news client.
Pan is a graphical newsreader client that works with GNOME and is the default news reader for Fedora. If you have the GNOME libraries installed (and they usually are installed by default), you can also use Pan with the pan &. Pan supports combining multipart messages and the yenc encoding/decoding protocol. Figure 5.15 shows a sample Pan display.
FIGURE 5.15 The Pan graphical newsreader is one of the nicest available for Linux, shown here browsing through a Red Hat usergroup.
