Installing garmin express in linux with wine

garmin-express-wine.md

First we start by creating a wineprefix and installing our prerequisites from terminal:

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=/home/$USER/GarminExpress winetricks dotnet452 vcrun2010 corefonts

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=/home/$USER/GarminExpress winetricks win7

Note: You will be prompted during the setup for .NET installation just hit next and finish. Also, I like to seperate win7 after the prerequisites are setup to make sure the wineprefix runs in Windows 7 mode.

With that out of the way we need to download and install our GarminExpress.exe Setup executable. I downloaded mine from https://www.garmin.com/en-US/software/express

Run the GarminExpress.exe file in our wine prefix

WINEPREFIX=/home/$USER/GarminExpress wine explorer /desktop=garmin,1366x768 /home/$USER/Downloads/GarminExpress.exe

Note: If you downloaded the GarminExpress.exe to another location replace it above

Modify your shortcut to be the following command

WINEPREFIX=/home/$USER/GarminExpress wine explorer /desktop=garmin,1366x768 ‘/home/$USER/GarminExpress/drive_c/Program Files/Garmin/Express/express.exe’

Upon Launch you should see this screen which should recognize your Garmin device

I'm running Debian/Trixie on an AMD64 system. I got GarminExpress to work using cbeley's scripts (which don't work directly as downloaded - they refer to other scripts and also have his name embedded). Anyway, I got it to launch but wouldn't recognize the device. I added the device as a drive using winecfg but that didn't help.

I can see the device and its files from Linux. Interestingly a lot of the folders have a 1979-12-31-date stamp. I know the device is old but these dates don't seem reasonable. Other dates are from 2007, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2019 and 2022, which seem more like how the device was actually used.

I'm not sure why usb should prove to a problem for wine. It seems to me that wine should just be able to recognize the ports directly.

My interpretation of https://wiki.winehq.org/Hardware#USB is: If a device has a Windows kernel space driver, wine can pass through device access from the Windows kernel driver to the USB device via libusb. If the application/driver wants to talk to the USB device using winusb.dll: no dice. Mass Storage is a kernel space driver, but not a third party one you can install, but one built into (or shipped with) Windows itself.

I'm wondering if it is sufficient to give wine access to the already mounted drive: https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_User%27s_Guide#Drive_Settings