Having said that, I’d like to present CWirc, an XChat irc client plugin which enables you to send and receive morse code through IRC. Developed by a fellow ham F8EJF, CWIrc has a lot of features which really enhance your CW experience on the internet, including the option of hooking up a real CW keyer using serial port interface.

CWIrc enables you to exchange morse code with fellow irc users on the internet, provided that the other users also knows morse code and has installed CWIrc. Though this might sound a little bit of a stretch when thinking the odds of meeting people with both requirements, it is actually not so in reality. You can find those kind of people exactly in #cwirc on irc.freenode.net server who are eager to chat with you in CW.

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Requirements

• Linux (or Unix based) machines (I personally used Ubuntu)
• XChat IRC Client
• CWIRc plugin

Both XChat and CWIrc are included in Ubuntu (as well as Debian) software repository, so you don’t need to compile or download separate package from their respective websites.

The upgrade was smooth and went without a single hick-ups. I’ve written an Ubuntu Gutsy upgrade tutorial here

Compiz (read: cool desktop effects) is installed by default and it just take one-click enable it and it work well to on my 6 year old Pentium 4 1.7GHz pc. Though I think a leap to the latest AMD(or Intel Core 2 Duo) processor would be nice.

All in all, I love using Ubuntu, easy software installation, no constant virus/spyware problem, low maintenance and less headache, enough said.

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