Quassel

Quassel
(sometimes referred to as Quassel IRC) is a cross-platform IRC client introduced in 2008. It is dual-licensed under GPLv2 and GPLv3, while most graphical data is licensed under the LGPL and provided by the
Oxygen Team
. The Quassel client uses the Qt framework for its user interface.
Quassel is split up into two parts by a server-client model; a client and a core. There is also a monolithic version of the official client that does not require a core. The core(server) is the application that actually does the communication with IRC networks, while the client(s) only communicates with the core. This gives the user a flexibility of having the same instance to IRC networks on different clients (e.g.
mobile
, desktop) at the same time.
Installation
Basic usage
Just install the
quassel-monolithic
(or
quassel-monolithic-qt
if you are not on KDE or you want to install fewer dependencies) package if you only want to use Quassel from a single computer (e.g. for quickly
asking for support
on
Arch IRC channels
).
Configuration
Setting up a bouncer (Quassel core) to be permanently online
Install
quassel-core
on the server and
quassel-client
(or
quassel-client-qt
) on your desktop.
Obtain a TLS certificate
. Concatenate both the private key and the certificate into
/var/lib/quassel/quasselCert.pem
:
# cat
private_key.pem
certificate.pem
> /var/lib/quassel/quasselCert.pem
# chown quassel:quassel /var/lib/quassel/quasselCert.pem
Open TCP port
4242
in your
firewall
.
Start core by
starting
quassel.service
.
Start the client and connect to core:
$ quasselclient
Accept your self-created certificate.
Now set up your IRC-servers and IRC-nicknames on the core.
Note
As this is the first time you connected to the core, you should see a wizard where you can set up the first user-account. If you do not get this wizard, your settings might be messed up, deleting
~/.config/quassel-irc.org/quassel-storage.sqlite
will allow the wizard to run but will require you to re-create your configuration.
If you choose to use
PostgreSQL
as backend you will need to create a database and user for quasselcore.
[postgres]$ psql -c "CREATE USER quassel WITH PASSWORD '
myPassword
';"
[postgres]$ psql -c "CREATE DATABASE quassel WITH OWNER quassel ENCODING 'UTF8';"
See also
PostgreSQL instruction on Quassel wiki
.
Once it all works, you can
enable
quassel.service
to start automatically on system boot.
Setting up multiple clients to connect through the same core
If you want additional users to be able to use the same core, run as the quassel user:
[quassel]$ quasselcore --configdir=/var/lib/quassel --add-user
It will then prompt you for a new account's username and password.
Spell checking
For spell checking, make sure
hunspell
and a language dictionary for it are installed. Enable it by selecting the check-boxes in
Settings > Configure Quassel... > Spell Checking
and restarting your client.
Tips and tricks
Viewing logs
In addition to the tools listed in the
Quassel wiki
,
quarg
AUR
allows searching through the database.
Waiting until the network is up to start
By default,
quassel.service
is only depending on
network.target
. To wait until the network is up,
edit
the unit to use
network-online.target
instead:
/etc/systemd/system/quassel.service.d/network-online.conf
[Unit]
After=
After=network-online.target nss-lookup.target postgresql.service
Wants=
Wants=network-online.target postgresql.service
See also
QuasselWiki