How to open .azw or .prc (mobireader) files

[Josef Lowder]

.
>>> Josef Lowder wrote:
>>> Is there any way to open and read .azw or .prc (mobireader) 
>>> files with Linux?
>> 
>> Joseph Sinclair wrote
>> Have you looked at FBReader (http://www.fbreader.org/)?  It's 
>> supposed to handle the .PRC files (provided there's no DRM!), and 
>> runs on Linux as well as a bunch of other platforms, it's also Free 
>> Software (GPL).
>> 
>> Thanks Joseph.  I've downloaded it ... the website says to extract 
>> it in the root directory.  Does that sound right?  I don't recall ever 
>> seeing instructions to extract a program in the root directory before. 

On Sun, 04 May 2008 15:26, Joseph Sinclair wrote
> They have .deb and rpm packages for most distros, you should be able 
> to use that to make things easier.  (For instance, in Ubuntu or 
> Debian you could do an apt-get install fbreader)
> 
> If you do want to build from source, I'd just extract to a new 
> directory in /tmp and do the three-step (./configure; make; sudo 
> make install) there.

My system is Mandriva 2006 so I don't think apt-get will work and 
I do not have Synaptic on this system.  The fbreader website says 
that the download is for Linux desktops and it does not seem to be 
source code that needs to be compiled.  It says to extract it in 
the root directory, so I tried to do that in /root and that resulted 
in a lot of subdirectories including 'share' and 'usr' and 'bin' and 
some others ... and trying to execute 'fbreader' does not work, but 
gives an error message referring to some missing 'lib' file.

So, I wonder if they meant I was supposed to extract the tarball in 
'/' rather than '/root' ... and I wonder if there is any risk in 
trying to do that since there are already existing directories by 
the same names in the top '/' directory.