KIRC FAQ Last updated: December 29, 1997 KIRC Stable Release: 0.4.3 (11/8/97) KIRC Development Release: 0.5.3 (11/30/97) * Mission Statement * Features * Where to get and download KIRC * Installation tips * Troubleshooting * TODO List * Miscellaneous * Important Note for Redhat 5 users Very Important!!! Mission Statement KIRC is a new IRC client for UNIX running X and the KDE Desktop environment. Eventually KIRC will be ported to environments without KDE. The goal of KIRC has been to provide an intuitive and user-friendly interface to IRC, while emphasizing power, speed, flexibility, and conservation of system resources. Although KIRC provides and intuitive X interface to internet chat, it does not alienate longtime users of text-based irc programs. KIRC will support a wide variety of commands, as well as allowing the user to create their own. KIRC fills a need for a truly powerful and easy to use IRC program for the X Windowing platform. The official homepage of KIRC can be reached at http://x.unicom.net/kirc/ - here, you'll be able to get the most up-to-date news and versions of KIRC that the author Aaron Granick (parallax@ucsd.edu - "Para||ax" on the EFNet IRC network) releases. Check here often. Features The most obvious feature of KIRC is the windowed environment of the IRC session. Each channel lives in its own window, with its own userlist on the side. Various user-level actions can be used with the mouse by rightclicking on the nick in the userlist. Message (/msg) windows are also individualized, making /msg sessions with several nicks easier to keep a track of. To customize the look-and-feel of the IRC environment, Para||ax has implemented an easy-to-use theme loader. Themes are basically facelifts that a user can apply to KIRC so that one isn't stuck to the plain (albeit simple and attractive) windowing texture that the Qt libs provide. Another cool feature is the ability to detach channel windows from the MDI onto the window manager desktop. A detached channel window will be familiar to those who use terminal-based clients, but with an ultra cool userlist on the side, of course :) DCC send/get and chat are also implemented (chat is available in versions >= .5.2). DCC resume will be incorporated soon. On a sidenote, the dcc programs are separate from the main kirc binary. Why? you ask? Well, if you're downloading a huge file (an mp3 or something), your transfer will continue on its merry way if something happens to the running kirc session (a crash) - pretty cool, eh? Where to get KIRC As stated before, the official KIRC homepage (http://x.unicom.net/kirc) is where you should look for the most current development and stable versions (.5.3 and .4.3 at the time I write this). Along with the KIRC distribution, you will need the following packages: Qt shared-libraries, KDElibs, and KDEsupport. If you want to compile KIRC yourself (you'll have to if you want to run the latest development version - .5.3), you will need to grab the development Qt package as well (this package contains the Qt header files needed for a successful KIRC compilation). The KDElib and support packages are available at http://x.unicom.net/kirc/libs . Of course, if you're running a Redhat system (or any system with RPM installed), you can grab the RPMs from http://x.unicom.net/kirc/libs . So just to recap, if you want to compile KIRC, you must get both the Qt and Qt-devel packages, and the KDElib and KDEsupport packages (either the source or binary tarballs) along with the KIRC sourcetree. If you want to use the i386 binary of KIRC, you do not need to get the Qt-devel package. Installation The installation of the Qt libs is pretty straitforward.. either install the RPMs or follow the instructions in the INSTALL file packaged within the distribution (also available from the troll download page). Installing the KDE packages should be simple, too. Unarchive the tarballs into a suitable directory (tar -zxvf kde*.tgz), and then: ./configure make make install for each package. That should install all of the necessary libraries into the right places. You will also do the same with the KIRC tarball - unarchive, ./configure; make; make install . After the above steps, you should be able to run KIRC! Troubleshooting If KIRC runs fine for you when you invoke it with "kirc &", skip to the next section. I will hopefully be able to remedy any problems you have running kirc with the following solutions. Will KIRC run under KDE Beta2? Yes, though a compilation is required (ie, the binary distribution probably won't work). I get an error when I run ./configure - it says I don't have giflib32 (or similar), and that I should install kdesupport. If you haven't installed the kdesupport package, do so. If you have, and still get that error, it's possible that the libgif libraries are not in your ldconfig path. Add the directory that the gif libraries are in to /etc/ld.so.conf (scroll down a bit to the can't load library "libqt.so" example for more detailed instructions.) ./configure tells me I don't have Qt! Get and install the Qt shared libraries (look at previous section). I get: bash: kirc: command not found (or similar) after I do a make install. The kirc binary is probably not in your path. After you have done a make install, do: find / -name kirc . It's most likely that find will find kirc in a directory that's not in your Path (do echo $PATH to look at your current Path). If this is the case, add the directory to your path by editing your ~/.bash_profile file (or whatever the config file is for your shell). I get: kirc: can't load library libqt.so after I installed the Qt libs. This one is probably due to a missing lib path in your /etc/ld.so.conf . Do: find / -name "libqt*" , and append (ie, don't erase the current lines) the directory(ies) that have the Qt shared libraries. For example, if find / -name "libqt*" gives this output: /usr/lib/libqt.so /usr/lib/libqt.so.1 /usr/lib/libqt.so.1.31 Then this would suffice: echo "/usr/lib" >> /etc/ld.so.conf (as root, of course). After adding the appropriate directories to /etc/ld.so.conf, make sure you run /sbin/ldconfig to apply the new changes. I get: kirc: can't load library libkdeui.so.0 (or libkdecore.so.0 or libkhtmlw.so.0) after I did a make install. This is the same lib path problem as the above example. By following the same steps, you should be able to fix this problem (use "libkdeui*", "kibkdecore*", and "likhtmlw*" in the find statements). The KDE packages tend to install to the /opt/kde directory. All KDE apps (including KIRC) look to this directory for certain shared files. To make sure the KDE apps look here, make sure your KDEDIR environment variable is set to that directory. You can set it by typing export KDEDIR=/opt/kde before you run KIRC, but this can be tedious. It's best that you add it to your ~/.bash_profile so that it's loaded everytime you start an xterm/rxvt/eterm/whatever. Below is my own .bash_profile: PATH=$HOME/bin:/bin::/usr/local/bin/:/usr/bin:/usr/local/kde/bin:/opt/kde/bin ENV=$HOME/.bashrc USERNAME="antonyn" SHADERS=/usr/local/shaders NNTPSERVER=news.ucla.edu LS_COLORS="di=33;1:ex=36;1:fi=37;0:ln=35;1" MOZILLA_HOME=/programs/communicator KDEDIR=/opt/kde export KDEDIR MOZILLA_HOME LS_COLORS NNTPSERVER IRC_SERVER IRCNAME SHADERS USERNAME ENV PATH The KDEDIR=/opt/kde and export lines are the lines you should look at. Oh no! I get these blank boxes instead of pretty icons in channel actions! Make sure the icons in the icons/ directory of the KIRC package are moved or copied over to /opt/kde/share/apps/kirc/icons . If this directory doesn't exist, create it. TODO List: Here are a few features that are planned (this is a continually growing list): * Scripting * Visual Notification when a message comes to a minimized window * DCC get/send resume capability * lots more :) Miscellaneous Here are a few things that didn't quite fit anywhere else in this FAQ. * To suppress output from the calling xterm/rxvt/kterm/eterm, do the following: kirc >& /dev/null & Detached windows are not controlled by the main KIRC session - this is the window manager's job. Future versions may leave control to the controlling KIRC session (using some sort of CTRL-TAB scheme). KIRC will eventually phase out the kde portions, meaning you won't have to install the kde packages. This also means the name "KIRC" will be obsolete - we need a new name! Send your suggestions to parallax@ucsd.edu. The following image formats are supported for icons and backgrounds: gif, bmp, xpm, ppm (not jpg) - size shouldn't matter. Bug reports. KIRC is still in early beta, so there are bound to be a few bugs here and there. If you think you've found a bug, feel free to mail Aaron at parallax@ucsd.edu. Important Note for Redhat 5 users. As everyone knows, the latest version of Redhat's distribution comes with the Glibc shared libraries instead of the usual libc5. While ultimately this will The Right Thing To Do(TM), it tends to break a lot of things that are compiled against the old libc5 - KDE and Qt binary/binary-rpm distributions included. This means that you will have to get either the source rpms or the source tarballs for every package (KDElibs/support and Qt) and compile them. Goto the installation section for further details. Along with recompiling the various packages, you will also have to edit your /etc/ld.so.conf. The default Redhat 5 /etc/ld.so.conf has /usr/i486-linux-libc5/lib listed before /usr/X11R6/lib in /etc/ld.so.conf. You must edit this so that /usr/X11R6/lib is listed first. The original listing would tell ld to look for older libc5 shared libraries before the proper glibc based KDE/Qt libs, causing things to break. Make sure you run /sbin/ldconfig after you have edited the file so that the changes take effect. ________________________________________________________________ antonyn@ucla.edu