first steps in IRC with pidgin

1. “Add Account”  for each IRC server/user pair (e.g. irc.freenode.net), that you want to use, within pidgin with IRC as protocol
2. “Join a Chat” (below Buddies), select the right Account (i.e. one of your IRC protocol/server accounts), enter the Channel (including the ‘#’), leave the Password blank! here we are!

Did I mention recently, how much I love my pidgin?
I did all this with a (fink) pidgin on my MacBook running Snow Leopard (OS X), but I don’t doubt, it will also run on my openSUSE Samsung notebook.