Configure IRC on your system
Pidgin (https://www.pidgin.im/) is an IRC client that uses the GUI. It will run in either GNOME or KDE (it also has versions for Windows, Macintosh, and some other operating systems too). It is pre-installed on openSUSE, so all you have to do is configure it to talk to our IRC server.
1) Log into one of your two computers (my instructions will be for the GNOME version, but only the "start pidgin" steps will be different).
2) To start Pidgin, click on the "Computer" button in the bottom-left corner of the page. Click on the "More Applications..." button, and then type Pidgin in the filter box. Click on the purple bird icon that appears.
3) Click on the "Add..." button to add an account, with the following settings:
4) The "Buddy List" should pop up, and you should be listed as "Available"
5) To join the #cis235 chat, click on Buddies, and then "Add Chat...", with the followign settings:
For now on, if you only disconnect from your console, and also keep Pidgin running, you'll see the messages even if you disconnect from the VPN (since your Linux system will continue to be logged into IRC).
There is a program running acting as the user "bot." If you type a line into the chat starting with "!google" (no quotes) and put something to search, the bot will tell you the top result for that search. (So "!google yccc" and then [Enter] should point to our website).