Unfortunately, there are still bugs in either wine or mIRC which cause it to hang after an extended period of use under wine (a couple of hours) - but if you can live with that, then mIRC runs reasonably well (although the irc displays are very slow to update...)
Sorry to say this but... This is the very reason (according to some regular posters here who know what they are talking about) as to why mIRC will never appear as a .tar.
The other reason is that Khaled probably doesn't want to either do this task or even hand the task to others. He does seem quite defensive about dishing out mIRC's source code and I can't blame him.
Invariably the motion for a Linux mIRC always ends up in a Windows v's Unix debate. The Unix brigade are happy to live in denial about Windows NT being able to match it for stability. Proof of this is that I chat on a Windows based network and all four servers have been up for the last 8 months so get a clue.
The next issue is the continued questions when Khaled has a personal homepage with his signature in BLACK INK which clearly states that there will NOT BE A UNIX/LINUX/APPLE/ATARI/C64/WINDOWS-CE versions of mIRC. The l337 coders you say are forming an orderly queue to assist with this will therefore be waiting for a long time, I hope they packed a lunch or two and took a chair.