If you have a Asus 1215n with the AR8152 Ethernet controller chip you may have noticed that it doesn’t work right out of the box, although thanks to this blog I managed to get it working. You will notice that the instructions from the blog just mentioned are for fedora 13, and unfortunately there are some differences in the kernel between the releases (2.6.32 – 2.6.35) that will make the compilation of the driver fail. I’ve created a small patch that takes care of this issue, but I leave no guarantees, you’re on your own if it doesn’t work.

Figure I would share a letter I wrote to the SCM Microsystem regarding their smart card chipsets, that I believe is found in some of the HP EliteBook models (this is not confirmed, but according to a letter written by HP to a customer, it seems that way, source) .

Hello,
My name is Patrik Martinsson and I’m currently working as a system administrator at a government funded meteorological institute in Sweden.

We have a lot of “Linux-desktop-clients” in our company (around 1/5 of the employees choose Linux, at least to us that a lot ).

Somewhere around 2009 we started to use smart card on all our clients to authenticate ourselves, this was a bit of a hassle to get working on the Linux side, but we finally got the clients working as we wanted, with one exception, the internal smart card readers just wouldn’t work (sadly to say, I wasn’t that surprised). There was no way to get them working, mostly because we couldn’t identify them, nobody could really, not even HP support when I called them (not the people I spoke to anyway). So we started to buy “external” pcmcia card readers for our Linux users, which was an acceptable solution, not preferred in any way, but acceptable.

Anyway, today a college of mine stumbled over a letter from HP to a customer that indicates that their models (at least one of them, EliteBook 2540p) has the scr241 chip, and that it is possible to use your kernelmodule (with a small modification, adding their, HP, pcmcia_decvice_prod_id, so your module will recognize it, I’m not a developer, so please correct me if I’m wrong) on atleast, HP EliteBook 2540p (my guess is that your chip is other HP models too), to get the internal smart card reader to work.

Sadly to say, you only have this scr241 driver for Linux available for 32-bit architectures, which to me is a shame, and also a bit surprising, since I noticed that you have all the Windows drivers for both 32 and 64-architectures.

So, what I ask, and what I really really need from you is your, proprietary driver for the scr241 chip, compiled for a 64 bit architecture (libSCR24x.so.4.2.1), I don’t ask for any support or anything like that on the driver, I just need it to work on 64-bit architectures so I can test whether we can get our internal readers to work.

Please, I’m asking you as a developer to help a sysadmin out!

Best regards,
Patrik Martinsson