For posterity sake, since I can now run it again I'll post my solution as well.
I could run it in wine as well (64 bit though) but gave up on it due to some graphical [no clock and some screen tearing] and input issues [after the window lost focus once, I could not use the keyboard anymore O_o ] .
For an unrelated matter, I ended up switching from nouveau to the proprietary Nvidia driver (needed cuda for a research project) and installed bumblebee alongside it as well. Turns out if I now run
optirun -b none ./PROLinux.x86 (<- note that I don't know what's the default bridge used, but if I don't pass the "-b none" the problem remains ... )
I can run natively the game, so I guess the problem was that neither the intel integrated graphic card, nor the Nvidia card with nouveau could run an adequate version of OpenGL? Not sure how it works but using the proprietary drivers works! ^^