After some failed attempts at getting Descent II installed using Wine
and running under a KVM guest (audio broken, meh) I turned to the
dxx-rebirth project, an open-source descendent of the Descent I/II series.

http://www.dxx-rebirth.com

This is how I was finally able to run Descent II on Linux.

I first compiled d2x-rebirth on Mint (Julia)

Satisfy pre-reqs.
mdf@sushi ~ $ sudo apt-get install scons
mdf@sushi ~ $ sudo aptitude install libsdl-dev
mdf@sushi ~ $ sudo aptitude install libphysfs-dev
mdf@sushi ~ $ sudo aptitude install nasm
mdf@sushi ~ $ sudo aptitude install libsdl-mixer1.2-dev

Download the source tarball and extract into /opt/games/dxx-rebirth/

Note the crucial flags to scons, without them it would not compile.
mdf@sushi /opt/games/dxx-rebirth/d2x-rebirth_v0.56-src $ scons use_ipx=0
sdlmixer=1
mdf@sushi /opt/games/dxx-rebirth/d2x-rebirth_v0.56-src $ sudo aptitude
install arj

From my Descent II CDROM, extract the files listed in INSTALL.txt to
/home/mdf/.d2x-rebirth/

Here we go!
mdf@sushi /opt/games/dxx-rebirth/d2x-rebirth_v0.56-src $ ./d2x-rebirth-gl

Sound worked great. I customized my keyboard controls and set mouse
sensitivity high. It's rolling good fun!