Just type 'wine eqgame.exe patchme' - it is supposed to work with wine, but I never got past the character screen, which had 'invisible' characters. I Imagine if I really tried, I'd get it to run (you just have to Google a lot), but I still have a windows machine for a client.
I did get it to run pretty good with Cedega ; you might want to try it. Cedega comes with a free trial period in many distros now. I think they don't disable you, just quit support for upgrades, but all you need is to play EQ, so unless you want to play other games, it should work.
I can do a lot of other stuff with wine, run most Windows applications - but EQ just won't work for me.
There's an application called 'wine-doors' , you may have it with your distro if not go to
RPM search and download it (search for wine-doors). with this application, you can easily download and install things like Directx9, which is needed for many windows games (including EQ). Also you'll see a lot of Fonts and Libs you can use (aside from all the applications).