On my home computer I have wine version 1.5.24-74-g5069ad7, from whatever it was I last attempted to use wine for. (And I also have wine version 1.4.1 from the Debian 7 package.) I also already have a ~/.wine/ directory which may or may not interfere, or help, or who the hell knows....
For kicks, I simply ran this, without trying any of the MWDF install script separate-profile stuff:
WINEARCH=win32 winetricks -q dotnet40 corefonts
I got many, many screens full of "fixme:incomprehensible gibberish" but it seems to have done something. At least it didn't give fatal error messages, hang, and require Ctrl-C like when I tried it on the work machine. And since it moved on to the fonts, and downloaded a bunch of those, and appears to have created font files in my ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/Fonts/ directory, it's possible that it might have succeeded.
Now I wish I knew which thing specifically caused it to work on my home computer and fail on the work computer. The wine-compiled-from-git version? The preexisting ~/.wine/ directory? Some optional Debian package that is installed? I really have no idea. I was expecting that I'd get the fatal error message, and have to create a symlink from ~/bin/some-desktop-environment-thing to /bin/true and try again, so the "success" took me quite by surprise.
Next step, I suppose, is to download the MWDF-for-Windows package and see if I can execute the GUI.
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And that was successful, technically speaking. The GUI is nearly painful to use, because it takes about 20 seconds for it to redraw the screen (you can watch each individual widget get placed, one at a time), and it redraws the screen all the time... but it appears to have modified data/init/init.txt and so forth, so I'll call that a victory and move on to the next step -- building an updated dfhack.
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OK, got that. I did a "git pull" on my dfhack source directory (which is located inside a squeeze [debian 6] chroot, but I don't have git installed inside the chroot, so I do all the git work in the debian 7 system); tried to do "git checkout develop", got told that I needed to commit that change to eventful that allows the "master" branch to compile, added & committed that, did "git checkout develop" again, and also "git submodule update".
Inside the squeeze chroot, I made a new build directory, cd'd into it, had no idea what to do next... dug up the compile instructions, ran a complicated cmake command, ran "make install", which failed... went back to my post in the dfhack thread, where I noted that I had to export CC=gcc-4.5 and CXX=g++-4.5 to make it use those specific compiler versions, which I had built from source. Deleted the build directory, recreated it, exported the variables, cd'd into it, reran the cmake command, and "make install", and it all appeared to work.
Back in debian 7, I copied (using cp -a) each of "dfhack", "hack" and "libs" from the squeeze dfhack-enhanced df_linux directory into the MWDF/Dwarf Fortress directory. Ran ./dfhack, and the game came up full-screen. I quit out of that, edited data/init/init.txt by hand to turn that off, and ran ./dfhack again. Resized the window, and started a world generation.
So far so good.