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. For an example, see Figure 4.7. You can continue learning about
IRC at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InternetRelayChat.FIGURE 4.7 Use HexChat to join an online chatroom about your favorite
distro. (© GitHub, Inc.)
TIP
You can establish your own IRC server even though Ubuntu 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
http://www.irc.org/ftp/irc/server/.Usenet Newsgroups
Usenet is an old system that predates the creation of the World Wide Web. It
was the place to be in the early days and the source of many great memories,
but today it is little better than a ghost town with wind-blown tumbleweeds,
spam, and illegal exchanges of pirated content. Most Internet service
providers used to run free Usenet servers, and connecting was easy and
common, but most of the free ones are gone now, and traffic has dwindled.