cherry-picking 4c7fd80 for the faq article

[irc/freenode/web-7.0.git] / content / faq / chat.md

Title: Connect
Slug: chat
---
<p>To access the <span class="freenode">freenode</span> IRC servers,
you'll first need an IRC client.  Text clients include
irssi, WeeChat, and ERC.  Graphical clients include XChat, Smuxi, and Quassel 
for Unix and GNU/Linux, and mIRC for Windows. There is also the 
<a href="http://webchat.freenode.net/">freenode webchat</a>.
Packages for various IRC clients may be included on your operating
system install CDs and links to web sites for the client software can be
found

<a href="http://www.irc.org/links.html">here</a>.</p>




<p>Once you have a client, you'll need a server. 
You can simply use <b>chat.freenode.net</b> to reach our main rotation of
servers; or, you can find a more geographically-local server

<a href="irc_servers.shtml">here</a>.</p>




<p>After you've obtained your client and the name of
a server, you may still need a bit of help in getting connected.  Take a
look at this

<a href="http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/irctutorial.html">tutorial</a>

or this

<a href="http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/ircprimer.html">IRC primer</a>

on

<a href="http://www.irchelp.org/">irchelp.org</a>,

which contains a variety of other useful information as well.</p>