Posted by theamoeba on March 25, 2013 at 9:16am
The South African Drupal community has an IRC channel, #drupal-za on irc.freenode.net. If you are a local develop come and chat :). If you don't feel like downloading a client you can use the Freenode Webchat (http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=drupal-za). Otherwise you can have a look at the extensive list of IRC clients available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_Relay_Chat_clients.
Here is a list of other Drupal related IRC channels you might be interested in: http://drupal.org/irc.

Comments
Mint/Ubuntu
I'm also new to IRC (only used it years ago for fservs or some such).
Just today for the first time ran XChat (part of Mint, possibly on Ubuntu too) and followed this how-to to get on #drupal-za:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/XChatHowto
Xchat is brilliant, works on
Xchat is brilliant, works on Windows too which is nice. Yes it is available on Ubuntu too.
HexChat
For windows (and others actually) users - http://hexchat.org/downloads.html
We use this at Perceptum and its a fairly good free build of XChat.
--
Bryan Gruneberg
Chief ninja in charge at Perceptum Thought Squad
Google Talk bryan@perceptum.za.net
Skype perceptum-ts