HiPhish

Try it!? Seriously? If I wanted to just try it blindly I wouldn't have asked the question in the first place. Anyway, since this thread has been popping up in Google search results among the first entries i think I should wrap it up with some useful conclusion for people who come across this. There are few things I hate more than these useless threads polluting the internet. Well, at least it's not one of those "nevermind, figured it out, bye" threads.

First of all, BiG World Setup is outdated and no longer supported, don't use it. At all. Instead one has to download and extract mods manually and then install them with BiG World Install.bat. I prepared my Wine setup just as I described above, then i did the same in Windows (Win 7 64 Bit), extracted all the mods properly and installed everything. Finally, I went back to Wine, threw away the contents of the old Baldur's Gate 2 folder and place the game files from Windows in it. It works great, except a few small caveats:

1) The Wine version I used was 1.6.0 with the X11 driver. The native Mac driver doesn't seem to work for this game, but it's not a big deal, Baldur's Gate 2 won't need the extra performance. Other Wine versions will probably work as well, but don't fix what isn't broken.
2) There is excessive flickering on the screen with my graphics card (Nvidia 9400M), this is a common Wine bug I have to face in a lot of 2D games. Running Winetricks ddr=gdi got rid of the flicker.
3) If you install the Throne of Bhaal Extender (ToBEx) the game will crash when it tries to play a casting animation. You can turn off the offending option in the extender by following the instructions found here:
http://www.shsforums...-wine/?p=532979

Hi,

It is good to see that TobEx works well on Wine (mostly). I am unsure what is going on here, as it appears that only a single patch isn't being applied. You can work around this by opening ./TobEx_ini/TobExCore.ini and changing

[Spells]
Casting Fixes=1

such that "Casting Fixes=0

The error code doesn't really help me because the code indicates it can't find the error message, so I'm a bit stumped on this one.

Let me know if this works around things for the time being.
 

4) If the game is still flickering and clicks seem delayed you should turn on 3D acceleration. In baldur.ini make sure you have this line and that its value is 1, not 0:

3D Acceleration=1

5) Don't install all the mods. This goes for Windows and Wine equally, I had to learn it the hard way. There is a bunch of junk mods or mods that are still old and buggy. I know it's tedious, but you should go through the various mods and manually pick the ones you want and ask the community for the must-haves. It will take time, but it will make downloading, extracting and installing the mods much faster. Many thanks to everyone who helped me out on this one.
6) BiG World Install.bat does not work in Wine. I don't know why, but I know that WeiDU mods can work in Wine (modded icewind Dale 1 & 2 that way), so if you have a lot of time to burn you could try installing each mod manually.

Keep in mind that all this is just what I experienced now. Wine is heavily being developed on, as are these mods, so there is no way of telling what might still apply a year from now on. The best way is to try to get everything working without tweaks and then gradually apply these fixes until the game works the way you want it.

I can't believe it, I found the solution for my crashes. I was just about to give up entirely and shelf the game for the next couple of years, when I started another last desperate Google search and this thread was the very first search result:
http://www.shsforums...ex-21-and-wine/

In case the links breaks at some point in the future, here is the relevant quote:

Hi,

It is good to see that TobEx works well on Wine (mostly). I am unsure what is going on here, as it appears that only a single patch isn't being applied. You can work around this by opening ./TobEx_ini/TobExCore.ini and changing

[Spells]
Casting Fixes=1

such that "Casting Fixes=0

The error code doesn't really help me because the code indicates it can't find the error message, so I'm a bit stumped on this one.

Let me know if this works around things for the time being.

http://www.shsforums...-wine/?p=532979

This is driving me crazy. It seems to fine on Windows, but when I play in Wine the game crashes when I'm about to leave Candlekeep. Just about when Gorion finishes talking and before he starts casting. The same thing happens at the start of BG2 when irenicus is about to start casting his spells on me in the cutscene. Does anyone have any idea?

EDIT: To clarify, I installed and modded everythign in Windows accordint to the instructions. I also installed BG 1 & 2 in Wine and started & saved a new game there as well for the registry entries. The file path are the same as well and everything starts properly, it's just crashing when trying to play spell animations.

EDIT2: Also, the spell animations did work in Wine before I had any mods applied, so it's not like they are broken by default in Wine.

Well, thanks guys. I have reduced my selection to less than 50 mods now, consisting of the essentials posted by people and some quest mods that sounded nice. This looks much better than the monstrosity I had before and hopefully it will also install much faster. Before I go about installing, how do i clean up the existign Windows install? Is it enough if I just uninstall the games (I'm using the GoG version) and then trash the folders? Is it enough if I only do it to Baldur's gate 2 and not BG 1? As far as i understand the Trilogy didn't change anything about BG 1, it just copied the needed files over.

EDIT: I'm still trying to figure out what Infinity Animation does; at first i thought it just added some extra animations from IWD, but apparently it can add animations from Neverwinter Nights or Diablo 2. What kind of sense does that make, especially with NWN being a 3D game? is it worth getting or will it cause more problems than it solves?

Another question: Every time the BAT tried to install a mod i got a wardning bei WeiDU that the version I was using is unstable and that i should revert to an older one, unless I knew what i was doing (which I don't). Should I just ignore the warning? I got my WeiDU.exe from the link above yesterday, so it should be the latest version.

Also, if i only have a subset of the recommended mods and some of the standard mods, can I still use the BAT? What option should I pick? Still Standard?

(I would caution you against old huge quest mods like TDD or Region of Terror or Tortured Souls or Check the Bodies, though). 

Why exactly? I thought old mods would be well tested and more stable.