12.4. Chatting with Friends in IRC

Despite the emergence of instant messaging, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still used by a lot of people today. Freenode.net has tons of chat rooms dedicated to supporting major open source software projects. In fact, many people stay logged into them all day and just watch the discussions of their favorite BSD projects scroll by. This is known as lurking.

The xchat utility is a good graphical, multi-operating system IRC client (to install, type pkg_add -r xchat). Once the xchat package is installed, from the GNOME desktop in FreeBSD you can select Applications Internet XChat IRC. But the elite way to do IRC is to run a text-mode client in screen on an always-on machine, such as an old server. Another similar option is to use an IRC proxy client, also known as a bouncer, such as dircproxy.