n00b questions

[ab52]

So i am a noob at this
but have one or two questions

How can i make multply chat rooms for differenet topics
i tired changing my index.php to add this but it did not work

$params["channels"] = array("CHANNELNAME1","CHANNELNAME2","CHANNELNAME3");

and ten rehashed but it did not work


also all my users will be on Linux and in a shell i can type echo $USER which will give me their login name, is there a way i can pass this into phpfreechat so it uses that as their login name

thanks
Adam