I had tried to enter chat for many weeks, and got nowhere. Finally one day, I tried again, and then I discovered it: If you are going to a chat room where no one is chatting, nothing happens. You just get a pretty picture on the screen. As soon as I got into my first active chat room, I could pull up a list of the other rooms, and go wherever I wanted whether anyone was there or not. I think, I either have all this wrong, or it's just because I'm the the Eastern time zone of the US (halfway between UK evening recreation and most of US recreation time) and go to bed early.
Oh, I'm okay in Windows, but in Linux, I can't use my microphone because the permission box won't come up. If anyone could solve this, it would be great, as I have a similar problem in Citrix, which is a professional application for my teaching job, and no one will help me there.