On Sat, 06 Jul 2002 11:51:51 Kelly Ash wrote:

Dunno if I'm in the right place, still confused. Normal. *G*rr

Not exactly 'Linux' so thought I'd try here. I've downloaded mIRC and not sure what to enter into where to get to ALUG. Could someone walk me through it, please?

Sorry, but used to all of the IM's out there and this is really different.

Thanks,

Kelly

Hi Kelly,

You raise an interesting question here - I had never really thought about aproaching IRC from the prespective of someone familiar with other chat systems.

The biggest difference between IRC and the others is being open rather than proprietry. With the other systems a single company designs the protocol, writes the software and operates the service so they have complete autonomy (and there is nothing to configure).

With IRC, someone designed the protocol and documented it in an RFC, a number of people wrote software to work with that protocol (so there is a wide choice to software available) and a third set of people operate services using that protocol - in IRC speak the operators of the service are called networks and there a several big ones and lots of small ones to choose from.

Back to configuring mIRC, It is a long time since I used mIRC and I cannot remember the dialog boxes and menu options and don't have windows handy to check, but if I explain what info you need hopefully that will be enough.

On IRC discussion takes place in a channel (channel names normally start with a '#' character) and ALUG's channel is called #alug. A channel is hosted on a particular IRC network so the first job in configuring your software is to make it connect to one of the servers on the network in question. Alug uses the "Open and Free Technology Community IRC Network" and we have DNS alias set up so if you tell mIRC to connect to irc.alug.org.uk it will connect to a server on the right network. You then need to join the #alug channel.

If you can't find the correct menus/dialog boxes to set up these details you could also try typing the following:

/server irc.alug.org.uk

then wait for the message of the day from the server, i.e. lots of text and then type:

/join #alug

I hope this helps - if you are still stuck then reply again to the mailing list and perhaps someone who uses mIRC himself will be able to help.

Steve.