IRC

About

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. an open and venerable text messaging system, it is still widely used by Free/Open Source projects. You log into an irc server, using a chat client, with a username. You join a channel, usually for a specific project, and chat with people in that channel.

Most of the time people will hang out in a channel all or most of the time, and answer when they are active/have time. So it isn't uncommon to ask a question in IRC and get the answer an hour later.

Details

Once you get the client of your choice, you need to pick the following:

server: freenode.net or irc.freenode.net
channel: #tube
username: pick any name you like (if it collides with someone else you will be prevented/ dropped to a fallback)

Clients

There are many IRC clients for various platforms, and also a web interface.

XChat

windows download
OSX download
XChat is there in most Distro's package systems

XChat is a bit old-timey looking and a slight pain to configure, but works well and gives you most features of irc

Pidgin

downloads

Pidgin is a nice, user friendly multi-IM client, that supports IRC.

Web Client

clicky!