If you want to update the maps of your navigation system, Garmin recommends to install the Garmin Express software. Unfortunately, this application depends on the .net framework version 4.5 and is not available for Linux. Also, I was not able to start it with Wine. I installed the old communicator plugin in Firefox using Wine and it even detected my Nüvi 1490LM but updating the maps was not possible anymore with this tool. Instead, it offered me to use another older tool called MapUpdater 3.3.4 on the Garmin Express website. With this tool and Wine 1.7.46, I was able to update my maps using the following procedure.
I started with a fresh Wine 32bit environment by executing the following commands in a shell:
export WINEARCH=win32 export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32/ wineboot -u
Afterwards, I installed the .net framework version 4.0 using winetricks:
winetricks -q dotnet40
and started the downloaded MapUpdater. The update process required 10GB of disk space on the PC and took more than an hour. In my case, the remaining time shown by the tool was way off as it showed "3 minutes remaining" for about half an hour.