When you are reading this, I assume that you already know what IRC is and know how to use it basically. IRC, abbreviated from Internet Relay Chat, is an online chatting protocol with a long history since 1988. It is something like a retro version of Discord. I may write an article to teach you how to use IRC in the future but not now. Well, I am a fan of IRC although it is dying nowadays, maybe I am not a devoted fan of it but at least I think it is fun and I like it anyway.

As we know, there are some existing streaming services like Twitch and Bilibili. They may be the most common choice for most people, however, these are public services. Not every time you want to stream to public, sometimes you just want to stream to your friends. Besides, these commercial and public streaming services usually don’t provide the original steaming links to you, which means you cannot watch steaming on your local video player. Therefore, building a steaming server by your own is kind of necessary.

Sometimes we will have the need to share files to other people. If it is just a small file, such as a word document or an image with the size smaller than 5 MB, then sending it via email or instant messaging apps like WeChat will be enough. However, when it comes to large files such as videos, email or instant messaging apps won’t allow you to send because they have the size limitation for the attachment. Maybe someone will use cloud storage service like Google Drive, OneDrive, Baidu Netdisk and Mega.nz but these aren’t the best choice because you need to upload your files to their server and other people will download them from their server, this is not peer-to-peer, it will cost double time or even more if the server limits your download speed. So I think the best solution is to serve the files locally, of course you will need a public IP address before doing this. I will take Ubuntu for example.

I dropped Ubuntu because of the user interface of Gnome, and then KDE came to my eyes. I was looking for a desktop environment that has the taskbar at the bottom and without top bar, just like Windows, then I found KDE. The other reason why I choose KDE is that the theme color of it is blue, my favorite color, while Ubuntu uses the orange color as the theme color, I don’t like orange. I tried Kubuntu 20.04 LTS when 22.04 LTS hasn’t released. I was not satisfied with the Application Launcher (Start Menu) of 20.04, which was using Plasma 5.18 LTS, there was no option for me to view all applications sorted by alphabet, all the applications are categorized, although I could use other Application Launcher. Luckily, Kubuntu 22.04 LTS was released on April 21, 2022, together with KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS and its new Application Launcher with the feature that sorts all the applications by alphabet, this is a necessary function. I downloaded it from USTC Mirror and installed it in my computer. The fresh minimal installed Kubuntu cost 12GiB of disk.

After installing Windows 10, some necessary software should be installed. Luckily, there aren’t as many settings to do as Ubuntu.

Install Windows

This is the Step 0. Windows 10 can be downloaded officially from Microsoft, choose Windows 10 Pro edition while installing. However, I prefer the LTSC (Long Term Servicing Channel) edition. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 can be downloaded here (now at rg-adguard, BUZZHEAVIER, or via Magnet Link), here is an ed2k link for it too but maybe there aren’t enough seeders. Make sure not to download the evaluation edition from Microsoft official website.