Naken Chat

This is the best way to install Naken Chat if you're not running it on Windows and you understand a little about how Unix works. You can also recompile it for Windows using the following method, but you have to download MINGW and MSYS first. You can get these from the MINGW website.

The first step to compiling the chat is to download the latest source code in .tar.gz format. This is the first link on the page under the heading LATEST SOURCE. After downloading you will need to untar it. After untarring you need to cd into the directory that was created. Then type make to make the binary and optionally make install to install it into /usr/local/bin so it can be more easily run from the Unix prompt. So if, for example, the .tar.gz file was named nakenchat-2.00.tar.gz, you would type:

tar xvzf nakenchat-2.00.tar.gz
cd nakenchat-2.00
./configure
make
make install

Note: The configure script is new as of version 2.08 of Naken Chat. You can type ./configure --help to get a list of configure options. For example if you wanted to build the chat in the French language, you could type: ./configure --enable-language=french

If you have a cross compiler such as MingW, you could type: ./configure --compiler-prefix=i386-mingw32msvc- to build Naken Chat for Windows on a Unix box.

After installing you'll want to set up the nakenchat.conf file. This will set up your welcome screen, sysop password, number of allowed connections, and more. If you ran "make install", the nakenchat.conf file will be in /usr/local/etc. If you didn't want to "install" Naken Chat, you can just edit the nakenchat.conf file that is in the directory where the nakenchat binary is. Click here for information on the nakenchat.conf parameters.

To start the chat you can simply type nakenchat from the prompt or there are two command line parameters. The -f parameter will let you pass to Naken Chat where your nakenchat.conf file is and the -d parameter will cause the chat to run in debug mode (if debug code is compiled in). Debug mode means the chat won't run as a background task and it will show you all text on the console. A couple examples how to start the chat:

nakenchat
nakenchat -f /usr/local/nakenchat/nakenchat.conf

To stop the chat on Linux, FreeBSD, Darwin/MacOSX you can simply type: killall -9 nakenchat or if you compiled the .Q option in, you can stop the chat by being sysop and typing .Q.

To test the chat it is highly recommended you first log in through telnet. If that works you can try one of the many chat clients that are written for Naken Chat. To log in through telnet type this at the command prompt (assuming you are running the chat on the default 6666 port):

telnet localhost 6666

After logging in, there are many commands you can test out. All commands start with a . (or optionally / works also). Sysop commands are all capital letters and normal user commands are all lowercase. Click here for a list of Naken Chat sysop and normal user commands.

There are some advanced compiling options you can do to fine tune the server to your specific needs. Click here to learn some advanced compiling features.

If something isn't quite clear, feel free to email me and let me know so I can change this doc file. It's hard to write simple, easy to understand documentation, plus there are many features in the chat that I'm probably forgetting while I'm writing this file.