Re: PCMCIA-Reader

On 08/05/06, Sebastian Aschenbrenner <sebastian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,

Hello,

> Just was at Linuxtag in Wiesbaden. The one person on there told me
> that pcmcia-smartcard-readers are supported yet by opensc. But i just
> forgot to ask him which ones there are supported / which one works
> best with. Can you help me? Maybe you can also tell me where to buy
> one in Germany?

You can use the Gemplus GemPC card reader [1] using my CCID driver
[2]. The price is  58€ on http://store.gemplus.com/ but you may get it
for less somewhere else.

The only problem is that you will have to configure your system to
manage hot plug/unplug of the reader. The reader is in fact a GemPC
Twin (serial reader) with a pcmcia-serial bridge. It is automatically
seen as a new serial port under Linux when you connect it. Linux
distributions use too many hotplug/udev/hal/whatever different
framework to manage hotplug. So the CCID driver provide support for
none of them :-)
pcscd (from pcsc-lite) can do serial hotplug since 1.2.9-beta8 (September 2005)

Hope this helps. Bye,

[1] http://www.gemplus.com/products/gempc_card/
[2] http://pcsclite.alioth.debian.org/ccid.html

--
 Dr. Ludovic Rousseau