After you installed any of the games you may get a performance boost if you use the latest directX 9 version.

The easiest way to do so, is using winetricks:

winetricks directx9

Read more about winetricks, here:

http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks

There are some reports that DoW crashes in some situations when using specific version of ATI's fglrx driver.

It seems to be clear that fglrx version 9.3 and 10.12 are affected, while 10.10 seems to work fine.

 Crashes occur in (at least) these situations:

• DoW and WA: When a scout dies.

• Building a Tau Commander.

 There are several possbile work arounds:

• Use another driver (10.10 seems to work) or try your luck with the free radeon driver

• Disable glsl in wine's registry:

- Go to the console
- enter the following command: wine regedit
- The registry editor will open
- Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER
- Go to Software
- Go to Wine
- Go to Direct3D or create it,  if it does not exist: right click "Wine" and
create a new key named Direct3D
- Mark the new Folder(Key) Direct 3D, add a new "String Value" (Zeichenfolge
for german users) named UseGLSL
- DoubleClick UseGLSL and enter "disabled" at the content-field
 
Thanks to jost for the detailed information.
 If you are affected, you may want to have a look at the bug report as well:
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19232

1.0: Installer crashes with "Fatal Error 1603"

 This happens if you install from the CD version. The installer crashes when you need to enter the next CD.

The solution is to copy all contents from CD1, 2 and 3 to a folder on your disk and run wine setup.exe from there.

The installer will ask for CD1 at the end of the installation. Just press OK and everything will be fine.

Run these steps if you want to copy CD content to a "dow"-called folder in your home folder:

mkdir ~/dow

run this for all 3 CDs:

cp -r /path/to/your/mounted/cd/* ~/dow/

change to the folder and run the installer:

cd ~/dow && wine setup.exe

1.1: Installer crashes

The installer may crash for you when you attempt to install the game. If this happens, try changing your windows version. It seems that if wine reports a high windows version, more advanced, and unsupported(!) functionality is being used which causes the installer to crash.

Tests have been conducted and setting the windows version to "windows 2.0" yielded a install

1.2: Using offline patches isn't working!

Symptoms encountered: installer crashes or takes over the entire session with a dark background.

Again. Using windows version 2.0 seems to make the installers only request much needed functionality which wine already supports. This should fix the crashing. To avoid having the patch installer taking up the entire screen which can stall the patching process for some, one must run the patch within an emulated desktop.
You need not create this in your wine config, a shorter way of having an emulated desktop is to launch the patch installers like so:

wine explorer /desktop=foo,1024,768 dow-patch.exe

1.3: "DawnOfWar - InstallShield Wizard" does not close properly

This is a known bug but does not affect the installation/ gameplay. Just kill the process after installation like this:

pkill IDriver.exe

1.4: Game says my CD isn't inserted, or it's the wrong disc!

This is because wine cannot handle commercial grade copy protection, which is actually something that cedega supports, since Transgaming agreed to pay the fees required and include code which they cannot reveal to any other project.
However, this is only an issue until version 1.50 of the game. Install the offline patches and you are fine.

1.5: I didn't get asked for a serial (CD Key) and can't play online therefore, what to do?

You have to edit a registry key with wine. Open the tool "regedit" and search for this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\THQ\Dawn of War\CDKEY

There is also a key "CDKEY_WXP" for the extension "Winter Assault".

1.6: "System Initialization Failed! Errors: Could not find required data. Make sure you are running this utility from your Dawn of War directory."

The installer has a bug that occurs from time to time. This is not a wine bug, it happens under windows as well. The problem is that some directories do not get created. These are empty but neccessary.

Create them by hand in the installation path (e.g. cd to ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/THQ/Dawn Of War/) like this:

mkdir -p Profile

mkdir -p Engine/Data/

mkdir -p GraphicsOptions/Data/

If you plan to install the extension pack "Soulstorm" you should do this before applying patches to Dawn Of War.

Soulstorm is not a stand-alone and will get installed directly into your DoW folder. Patches applied by Soulstorm will downgrade your DoW installation.

Note: This is not a wine issue, the patches just suck.

1.0: How to determine version number?

Have a look in your W40k.ini which you can find at the path you installed Dawn of War.

For the lazy guys:

grep "gameVersion" W40k.ini

 1.1: How to enable anti-aliasing (this is not wine specific)?

Run GraphicsConfiguration.exe at least once. This will create a Local.ini in your DoW folder.

Open this Local.ini and change this entry:

screenantialias = 0

to:

screenantialias = 1

If you have problems with completely corrupted textures the problem might be that your systems lacks a library that is used for texture compression in Dawn of War.

Under Debian based system install the package "libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0" and try again.