As I recall you don't actually need access installed to use
*.mdb files. I _think_ I recall someone saying they had
used
to read those files under a unix
system. However you may (or may not, try it) need an ODBC driver, but there is
supposedly (according to the docs), a ODBC driver included
with the DBD::ODBC source. Otherwise there are links to
other cross-platform ODBC drivers in those docs.