How To Get Namecoins
1. Register account at exchange that supports trading BTC for NMC. For example BTC-E.
2. Find free Bitcoin faucet, for example https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/, and transfer some free bitcoins to get account from the exchange.
3. Convert your free Bitcoins to some Namecoins!
At the time of this writing, you can get about 0.35 NMC using this method, which is enough to register about 15 domain names.
Namecoins are mined in the same method as bitcoins.
At the time of writing, the only way of mining Namecoins efficiently is merged mining, i.e. Namecoins are mined as a free by-product of Bitcoin mining. Only a few mining pools offer merged mining, see Comparison of Mining Pools.- See the Trade page for a list of exchanges that sell namecoins.
To receive namecoins, you'll need a namecoin address. To generate a new address, do:
./namecoind getnewaddress
Each time you type this command, this will generate a new address. Namecoin addresses start with the letter 'N' or 'M' (example : N1KHAL5C1CRzy58NdJwp1tbLze3XrkFxx9)
Note: old namecoins addresses start with 1, like bitcoin addresses. To avoid confusion, format has been changed.