IRC meetings

The DoudouLinux team now organizes regular IRC meetings on the IRC channel #doudoulinux. They are announced on our dev’s mailing list and anybody can take part. To join the channel you have to use an IRC client and connect to the Freenode IRC network. Alternatively, you may prefer use the IRC web client and avoid installing anything. Once you are connected to Freenode, just ask for joining the channel #doudoulinux.

Tricks

In your IRC client window, type “/help” to get the list of available IRC commands. If you are not happy with your nickname on the channel, use “/nick NewNickname”. It is recommended to register your nickname so that only you is able to use this nickname on the Freenode network.

If you want to tell something to someone particularly, instead of the group, you just have to prepend your message with the nickname of your recipient plus a colon, for example:

jmphilippe: do you think DDL really rocks?

will probably send a notification to jmphilippe and highlight the message recipient so that other people know they are not much concerned – although they may be able to answer in this case ;). Note that you can start to type the first letters of your recipient then hit TAB to trigger auto-completion, colon included. It is possible to start private discussions as well but, as you may guess, this is not the first interest IRC chat rooms :).

Meeting controls

Control of the meeting is provided through Freenode ChanServ Commands. Only the channel owner is able to control the channel. The ChanServ robot can be accessed with the following command that asks for an exhaustive list of its commands:

/msg ChanServ help commands

In the ChanServ window, the most useful commands are:

• TOPIC #doudoulinux topic → changes the channel topic
• TOPICAPPEND #doudoulinux post-topic → allows for the addition to a topic on a channel
• TOPICPREPEND #doudoulinux pre-topic → allows for the addition to a topic on a channel
• SET #doudoulinux ENTRYMSG message → set a message sent to all users joining the channel
• SET #doudoulinux KEEPTOPIC ON|OFF → enables restoration of the old topic after the channel has become empty
• TAXONOMY #doudoulinux → lists metadata information associated with registered channels
• INFO #doudoulinux → displays channel information such as registration time, flags, and other details

All of these commands can be prepended with “/msg ChanServ” and typed from the normal discussion window.