First, books you'd be getting off of IRC (of which MIRC is just a client) are likely pirated, so you probably don't want to be asking about that here.
Second, have you tried a linux IRC client? I've not been on IRC for going on 8 years, but back then the top GUI client was XChat. That appears to still be around, along with the other clients (b****x, irssi, chatzilla, etc). Consider running one of those rather than trying to shoehorn a Windows app into Linux.
|