I also tried MTA:SA nightly in wine 1.1.19/Ubuntu 8.10/Nvidia driver 180.11 from repos.
This is what I did:
Downloaded latest nightly build (mtasadm-1.0-r656.exe) and installed without problems into an existing wineprefix with San Andreas installed*
Downloaded the dependencies (multitheftauto_data-r636.exe) and installed
Unpacked resources multitheftauto_resources-r129.zip (which are apparently not needed)
*San Andreas singleplayer itself works like a charm
This is the output it gave me:
$ wine 'Multi Theft Auto.exe'
fixme:actctx:parse_depend_manifests Could not find dependent assembly L"Microsoft.VC90.CRT" (9.0.21022.
err:module:import_dll Library MSVCP90.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Programme\\MTA San Andreas\\mta\\core.dll") not found
err:module:import_dll Library MSVCR90.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Programme\\MTA San Andreas\\mta\\core.dll") not found
err:module:attach_process_dlls "gdi32.dll" failed to initialize, aborting
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"C:\\Programme\\Rockstar Games\\GTA San Andreas\\gta_sa.exe" failed, status c0000005
So I ran "winetricks vcrun2008" which solved the missing dll issues.
Now the game gives me the same output as yours:
$ wine 'Multi Theft Auto.exe'
fixme:advapi:SetEntriesInAclA 1 0x197e65c (nil) 0x197e658
fixme:advapi:SetSecurityInfo stub
I think there are missing the right debug parameters that let wine say what is wrong.
Looks like these pages
http://www.multitheftauto.com/71.html
http://development.mtasa.com/index.php? ... _with_wine
are pretty outdated.
I would be really happy if any dev would work on this, since I think there are many linux gamers like me out there appreciating not being forced to boot into windows for playing MTA:SA
Edit: The file MTA/core.log shows the following error:
** -- Unhandled exception -- **
Time = Sun Apr 19 18:00:30 2009
Module = C:\windows\system32\user32.dll
Code = 0xC0000005
Offset = 0x7ED143DE
EAX=000010D7 EBX=7ED7BFF4 ECX=00000003 EDX=B7F875E0 ESI=00000000
EDI=00000000 EBP=0177EF1C ESP=0177EEF4 EIP=7ED143DE FLG=00210246
CS=0073 DS=007B SS=007B ES=007B FS=0033 GS=003B
** -- End of unhandled exception -- **
Edit2: Replacing the user32.dll with native one from windows partition does not help, MTA crashes with same error in core.log
Edit2: dp2.3 does not work either as Vaporize said above, even with unix loader