Garmin Express on Linux | Step by Step Guide

This is an installation guide on how to get Garmin Express on Linux working. In this Step by Step Guide, I go over creating a new wine bottle and installing Garmin Express in it.

Linux Package Requirements:

  • wine-devel Note:3.19 or higher
  • winetricks

Installation Steps

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

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

Garmin Express on Linux

With all this done you will be able to launch Garmin Express on Linux.

Video Walkthrough