Codeweavers Crssover has a bottle for AdiIRC which installs all the necessary dependencies for .NET 4.5, seems to work pretty good on both macOS and Linux.
Installing AdiIRC in Wine on 64 bit Ubuntu/Debian and macOS.
Wine is a Windows compatibility layer which allows you to run many Windows programs on Linux/macOS.
Winetricks is a script to help you install various Windows components and programs.
AdiIRC does NOT work in mono.
It should work on other Linux distributions as well, as long as a recent Wine version is installed.
On Ubuntu/Debian Type:
apt-get install wine cabextract
If the wine version in your Ubuntu/Debian repository is old, you can get the latest version from https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu.
On macOS type:
# If homebrew is not installed, type /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" # Then install Wine through homebrew brew install wine
Wine does not work well with running 64 bit .NET applications, so you must create a 32 bit wine folder.
Type:
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 winecfg
Type:
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks chmod +x winetricks
If you downloaded the 32 bit .NET 4.5 version of AdiIRC, type:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 ./winetricks dotnet45
If you downloaded the 32 bit .NET 2.0 version of AdiIRC, type:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 ./winetricks dotnet20
After .NET is installed, you should be able to run AdiIRC by typing:
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 wine AdiIRC.exe
It's possible to skin Wine/Windows programs to look more native in a Linux environment, check https://askubuntu.com/questions/219791/improve-gui-appearance-of-wine-applications/756781 for examples.
There has been some success running Wine headless using xvfb through screen.
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 screen xvfb-run wine AdiIRC.exe
If you have glitches when selecting text in the text area, try changing the message font to another font, preferably a monospaced font.