The following article contains opinions and personal views of the author and will be taken as such. There is no guarantee to the accuracy, timeliness of some of the information that may be found within the article. The methods that are discussed here might not be applicable in your case. The author will not be held liable for any damage caused by using the method/(s) described in this article . Use the methods at your own risk. - hardwyrd

If you’ve downloaded documentations, help files, and how-tos, I’m pretty sure you’re very familiar with CHMs. CHMs — or Compiled HTML Help (or Manual) files, were pretty much popularized by Microsoft (shudder…) and was(is) in use by Microsoft Help. CHMs are pretty much compact in its own allowing plain HTML help files to be crammed into a single file and yet have its layout and objects intact.

On Linux however, this file format is not natively supported. You’d have to use a reader app to get to the info contained in CHM files. One of those popular CHM readers is gnoCHM. Another, also popular CHM reader is xCHM. xCHM is the one we will take a short look for today.

xCHM is pretty much a basic and simple CHM reader. It features a very simple interface, with standard browsing buttons that you can find in virtually any type of internet browser. The reader afterall is like a browser on its own showing you the contents of a compiled “web site”. Using xCHM is a no-brainer. Since xCHM is not a part of the standard install of your favorite distro (not that I’m aware of), we need to get the package and install it ourselves. For this session, I am using SLED10, however, at the bottom of this article you will find steps in installing it in Ubuntu or Debian.

Getting xCHM
You can get the latest stable xCHM build from its website at Sourceforge. Or you can copy and paste the following to your browser:

http://xchm.sourceforge.net/

In the xCHM site, you can choose to download pre-built binaries for your specific distro, or you can get the source and compile xCHM yourself. I will feature building xCHM from source. Should you want to feel “gung-ho hard core” about this exercise, you may get the package using wget by doing the following in your terminal:

wget http://jaist.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/xchm/xchm-<version-number>.tar.gz


Once you have downloaded the xCHM source, we will need another set of package for it. xCHM uses the wxWidget GUI Library. If your distro doesn’t have this included, we will need to get wxWidget from its website. You may go “gung-ho hard core” again and do the following in your terminal:

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wxwindows/wxWidgets-<version-number>.tar.gz

Let’s Build!
Once you finish downloading wxWidget, we will need to extract it and compile it.

# tar xzvf wxWidgets-<version-number>
# cd wxWidgets-<version-number>/
# mkdir buildgtk
# cd buildgtk
# ../configure --with-gtk
# make
# make install
# ldconfig

With a working wxWidget install, we can now proceed to installing xCHM. Again, we will need to extract the xCHM source package and install it.

# tar xzvf xchm-<version-number>.tar.gz
# cd xchm-<version-number>/
# ./configure
# make
# make install

That’s all there is to it!

To test if xCHM works, just type xchm in your terminal or open a chm file directly by typing xchm /path/to/your/file.chm.

For Ubuntu / Debian users, you may get wxWidget by first adding the wxWidget trusted key.

# curl http://apt.wxwidgets.org/key.asc | sudo apt-key add -

Modify your /etc/apt/sources.list to include the wxWidget repo.

# wxWidgets/wxPython repository at apt.wxwidgets.org
deb http://apt.wxwidgets.org/ DIST-wx main
deb-src http://apt.wxwidgets.org/ DIST-wx main


Do an update of your apt cache.

$ sudo apt-get update

Install wxWidget.

$ sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8 python-wxtools python-wxaddons wx2.8-i18n

Once wxWidget is installed, you may proceed in installing xCHM from your Ubuntu repo. Make sure that you search first if xCHM is present, then proceed to installation.

$ sudo apt-cache search xchm
$sudo apt-get install xchm


You can also do wxWidget and xCHM installation in one command sweep after you have added the wxWidget repo.

$ sudo apt-cache search xchm
$ sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8 python-wxtools python-wxaddons wx2.8-i18n xchm

No sweat. ENJOY!

Screenshots

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