Getting Started

Installation

Prerequisites

Requires Ruby and GTK2 and libglade bindings for it. Get them:

sources
Debian: apt-get install libglade2-ruby You also need 'libpty-ruby' as debian splits up the ruby stdlib and 'ruby1.8-dev' for scw
Gentoo: emerge ruby-libglade2

Ratchet uses the Scw::View for displaying all chats. This widget, being designed specifically for this purpose functions much better then the Textview and requires no hacks to make it behave. Scw homepage

Follow the instructions and download and install scw and the ruby-bindings.

Ratchet from RubyGems

Releases of Ratchet are now available in gem format. If you have [htp://rubygems.org rubygems] installed and set up correctly all you need to do (assuming you have the above prequisites) is:

gem install ratchet

The gem should install correctly on windows and *nix.

Ratchet as a zip/tarball

Releases of Ratchet are available on the rubyforge project's files section. The packages include an 'install.rb' script that can be used to install on *nix systems.

Ratchet from Subversion

NOTE - the project has moved to RubyForge. Please check out the code from that repository.

 svn checkout svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/ratchet/trunk ratchet

Getting Started

To run ratchet, cd to the folder you checked out into, and

./bin.ratchet
OR
ruby bin/ratchet

A connection dialog window should appear with the ability to select a connection method and settings for that method.

Ratchet's 'local' method will connect using the icecapd binary on the current machine, the 'SSH' method allows you to connect to irssi2 on a remote machine and inetd lets you connect to icecap over *inetd, all methods will start icecapd if there is no instance running.

Configure the connection as you wish and hit connect.

You can now use the presence manager to create/edit/delete networks/gateways/presences and connect to a presence. The presence manager will pop up automatically if you have no connected presences.

Joining a channel is fairly obvious:

/join #icecap

For a list of other commands there is an inbuilt /help command.