CHM files are used on the Micosoft Windows platform to store program documentation, almost always in the form of HTML, with some non-standard quirks. Well, if you want a CHM viewer on gnu/Linux there is 'xCHM'. But how about viewing them on text console ?.

Well, if they are html file inside those complied and compressed libraries then you should be able to uncompress and extract them right.

On gnu/Debian Linux OS, the 'libchm1' package provides the library and the 'libchm-bin' provides testing tools has the chmtools.

libchm-bin - library for dealing with Microsoft CHM format files
libchm1 - library for dealing with Microsoft CHM format files

The tools which we will need to extract CHM files are in libchm-bin package

test_chmLib - extracts a file out of a chm file
extract_chmLib - extracts a chm file into a directory
chm_http - simplistic web server to allow browsing of chm files without extracting them
enumdir_chmLib - lists the contents of chm file(s)
enum_chmLib - lists the contents of a chm file

What really surprised me is that the 'chm_http' tools gives the same functionality as the 'archmage' (No-wonder its not in Debian yet)

So what are you waiting for, just extract or view th CHM without the need of graphical interface, but its not wise to use CHM file in the place itself.

http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/10969