Yes, I knew this IRC channel, #linux.mu since long. However, I joined in only a couple of times before. Yesterday, while I was kinda bored & was looking for something interesting/creative. I logged in & tweeted for others to pop in. A while later we had a small group of geeks joining the fun.
It was great. In fact, we thought that it would be nice to have more folks from LUGM & MSCC joining the techie talks here. But how to promote the channel? Throughout years, Instant Messengers like MSN, Yahoo, Skype & now Facebook took over IRC. For computer users in general IRC is dead (if I may call it that way). Most kiddos have never even heard of it.
I was among the lucky ones to have had the first Internet experience through IRC itself. Must be some time around 1999. I recall bunking college that day, wandering around Rose-Hill with friends. That’s when one guy said he’s going to a cybercafé. The name was new to me of course, I didn’t have a computer back then. I could not even draw a straight line on a computer if was asked to. I accompanied my friends and they rented a PC for some hours and connected with something called mIRC. I was just a curious observer. All seemed so fascinating to me. Wow! You could talk (communicate rather) to people from around the world. It appeared something marvelous.
That was my initiation to IRC. The following years, I would spend a lot of time on Servihoo chat rooms using IRC clients. I got my first computer in 2001 & a few months later I got hands on a Red Hat CD. From there I continued lurking around Linux channels gathering as much knowledge as I could. It was fun way to learn. I owe IRC a lot.
Throughout years IRC faded & was used only within the inner circles of the hacker community. I continued using IRC as openSUSE meetings are organized through the project channel on Freenode. So, that’s a way for most contributors to communicate. It’s a lot more convenient that emails.
Yesterday when I talked to Harish & Shane, I felt that the glory days of IRC may come back in Mauritius if it’s well presented to the kiddos. My first thought was introducing the same to the Uni folks in LUGM meetups. Then I thought I could also embed an IRC web client on my blog. Harish & Shane backed the idea & encouraged. So, this morning I got to some tinkering on HACKLOG.in. A while later, everything was set & I tweeted about it.
Yes … yes! I know I talk a lot. All I wanted to say is you can now use an IRC web client through HACKLOG.in to join LUGM Channel and the URL is => https://legacy.hacklog.in/linux-user-group-of-mauritius-irc-channel
