To run Black & White (and Creature Isle) without being affected by bug 14939 (texture bug), bug 15984 (crash bug) and bug 25417 (mouse bug), you have to run a version of Wine patched with the DXTn to ARGB texture conversion patch, blitting patch and the button click patch. To install this patched version of Wine, copy and paste the following commands into a terminal:

mkdir ~/src
cd ~/src
git clone git://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git ~/src/wine
cd ~/src/wine
wget -O wine-dxt13-to-argb4444-xrgb1555-conversion.patch http://bugs2.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=34559
wget -O wine-button-click.patch http://bugs2.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=35234
wget -O wine-dderr.patch http://bugs2.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=33563
patch -p1 < wine-dxt13-to-argb4444-xrgb1555-conversion.patch
patch -p1 < wine-button-click.patch
patch -p1 < wine-dderr.patch

./configure --prefix=/usr
make depend
make
sudo make install

With these three patches, Black & White is fully and perfectly playable through Wine.  If you encounter trouble patching, try looking at the bug threads for an updated patch (they are attended to more frequently than this Howto).

Set wine version to win98 for best results.

For 64 bit wine go to wiki.winehq.org/Wine64.

A picture posted of the intro with the Man and Woman kissing and little kid looking bored is the point at which a stall may occur.  Settings for Audio need to be changed from hardware acceleration to emulation at this point.  You can track the bug at http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12651.