Thanks to Arnaud from the Carrara SDK mailing list Copying the files msvcirt.dll and msvcp60.dll (Visual C runtime?) from a Windows machine into the .wine/c_drive/windows/system32 on the Linux machine has worked and I have a stable render node working on Wine and Linux. I did not manage to get the service pack to install but had to copy it from a working Windows node. I'll be writing this up in more detail later.