How to use IRC ( for newbies )

After having a meetup of the photography group “Incredible Bengal” it was decided to plan our schedules and meetings at IRC, network DALnet, channel #incrediblebengal. Only a few people know about IRC and also all are not techies. The people of this group are Windows, Fedora and Ubuntu users. So I was asked by a senior member Aloke da to write a small “how to use IRC” for the new users. I hope this will help them 🙂

This document covers installing and using X-chat, a popular IRC client.

How to install X-Chat :

Fedora Users :

To check if you have X-Chat installed in your system, type this:

$rpm -q xchat

If its not installed, install it with this:

$su -c 'yum install x-chat'

Now you can open x-chat by Applications>Internet>IRC

For more information see here..

Windows Users:

Download X-Chat from here. After that install it into your system.

Now you can open x-chat by Start>All programs>xchat-2

Ubuntu Users:

To check if you have X-Chat installed in your system, type this:

$dpkg -s xchat

If its not installed, install it with this:

$su -c 'apt-get install xchat'

Now you can open x-chat by Applications>Internet>IRC

How to begin with it:

Now you have already installed X-Chat in your system. After opening the X-Chat window you will have to edit the blanks as shown:

Start with writing your nick. Put a second and a third choice as shown. Then you give in your user name which may or may not be same with the nick and finally write your real name.

After that select the DALnet network and click on edit.

Highlight irc.dal.net there. Write #incrediblebengal at “Channels to join” and close it.

Now click on connect.

Then you are taken to the channel #incrediblebengal where you can see this :

Now you are ready to type here 🙂

Basic IRC commands on DALnet:

For help type this command and then press enter :

/nickserv help

For getting help about a particular command type this and then enter:

/nickserv help <command>

Example:

/nickserv help register

For registration of your nick :

/nickserv register <password> <yourmailid>

Example:

/nickserv register 12345 mailtoria@gmail.com

After this a verification mail is sent to your inbox and you need to authorize it according to the instruction in your mail.

For identification of user type this and enter :

/nickserv identify <password>

Example :

/nickserv identify 12345

For messaging a person at the main channel:

Use first letter of the person as on the list and then press tab to get the full name.

Example:

r+”tab” will do instead of typing ria

For personal messaging:

/msg <user_to whom_you_are_messaging> <message>

Example:

/msg ria how are you?

I have written some of the basic commands. Other commands can be used by taking help of the “help” command according to your requirements.

I hope this few things will help the newbies at IRC.

Loving Gimp

Recently I have developed a lot of interest in photography. Earlier I used to post photos at flickr but they were not that good as they are now, I feel. I have started using gimp to edit my pictures. Thanks to gimp for helping me to upload better photos. A tutorial has helped me a lot to learn gimp and I am loving experimenting with it. Gimp has also helped me to win the first prize at a photography competition at college. And these days I am getting a few flickr mails where people are asking me how I have edited a particular picture and which software I have used and I am liking it 🙂 . Still there are so many features which are unexplored and I am willing to learn them soon.

And also I am thinking of installing chdk in my camera Canon Powershot S3 IS so that I can take raw photos.

Some of my photos which are gimp edited :
This made me win the first prize on the topic ‘Go Green’ :

Some more:

More photos here..

Happy Birthday to dgplug

Happy birthday to dgplug :-). Today one more year completes for dgplug. 4 years back it was started by Kushal. Since then, lot of students from every year have participated in this linux user group. Today, we people, staying here at Durgapur gathered together to celebrate dgplug’s birthday with an informal discussion. At about 12:30 pm, 10 of us (me, Subhodip, Arindam, Ajitesh, Amrita, Debashree, Arpita, Sunny, Ratnadeep, Kishan) met at City Center (though arindam was 1 and a half hour late). We went to the food court, sat together and then the discussion started. Subhodip started with a brief introduction of dgplug and the way it started. He then asked us to share our experiences about our precious years we spent with dgplug. Amrita started with the summer training and the way she started with inkscape. She was followed by Arpita and Debashree with similar experiences. They said that they learnt a lot of new things from the training, though never completed reading any book :-P. Sunny then started and said how he is teased in his class for getting involved with all these. He is named as “Sunny Lenovo Linux Sharma” by his classmates (he owns a lenevo laptop). Still he said he never lost his spirit. Then the 2 guys from the 2nd year Ratnadeep and Kishan talked about their experiences. They too talked about the benefits of summer training. In between the discussion was paused for a while for having our lunch. We had delicious food there. Boys paid the bill :-P. After our lunch it was our turn, we people from 4th year. Ajitesh said how he bagan, with working for Bijira. He was followed by a long and detail speech by Arindam. He started from the very beginning and shared his experince in details, specially of the month spent at the training under Indrada (even about what food he had and free of cost :-P). Subhodip in the meantime was counting the months and was waiting for when Arindam will talk about this month after detailing all the months before :-P. He also talked about his SoC experience. Then he talked about his participation in freed.in and how he got involved with open street map which helped him get through SoC. Then it was my turn. I too said little bit of how it began and specially my experiences of summer training. Then Subhodip started by saying, his experiences are almost similar to Ajitesh and Arindam. Juniors asked lot of questions. And at the end of the day Subhodip gave his valuable suggestions and insisted to focus on a single thing rather than trying to do everything together. I was getting late as I had a limited time and I had to return to my hostel. So we hurried up and we went to a icecream stall. We had icecream and this time girls paid the bill :-P. And then finally we all returned after a nice day spent for dgplug. Hope this day is celebrated with all fun and discussion, every year.
Stay long dgplug :-).

Here are some photos

More photos here..

First time translation

Yesterday I did my first file translation in bengali. Though at the beginning I took a lot of time typing, but slowly I increased my speed little bit. I did few mistakes. Later Runadi explained me in details about my mistakes. Arindam also suggested changes. Finally I corrected everything and got my first translated file 🙂

Started with localization

I started with localization in bengali. I started talking with Arindam about it. He made me understand the entire thing. I took a look at the entire statistics of the translated and untranslated work of bengali localization compared to others. I then had a glance of the kde localization. I will start working with kdebase localization. I did a checkout of both the translated and untranslated pages (translated ones to have them as examples). Later I talked to Runadi about it. I took help of her blog to have the entire set up in my MacBook. Arindam helped me in the entire process. It took a long time in my slow internet connection for the set up 😦 .

But finally everything is ready. I have gone through the translated pages to understand it in a better way. I have saved the keyboard layout for probhat which I will be using. Now I take some time to search a letter from the keyboard and type 😦 , so I need to practice typing in bengali. I will take help of the ankurbangla dictionary for translations.

Hope to do some good translation soon 🙂