Irssi

irssi is a popular ncurses based IRC client.

When in irssi, two commands to get you started are:

/help

and

/set

and if you see an option in /set you'd like to modify:

/set autolog [log] autolog = OFF /set autolog on [log] autolog = ON /save

I've now set autolog on and saved my changes. You should be able to find these changes in ~/.irssi/config unless the default path for your configuration has changed.

Freenode
Edit ~/.irssi/config and under servers, add:

{ address = "irc.freenode.org"; port   = "6667"; chatnet = "freenode"; autoconnect = "no"; },

and under chatnets:

freenode = { type = "IRC"; autosendcmd = "/msg nickserv identify $PASSWORD; wait 2000;  },