A Humble Programmer

I have an Acer TravelMate 3000 laptop. The card reader did not work on Ubuntu Linux, and I didn’t care, because I didn’t need it. When I needed to transfer photos from my DC, I just used the USB cable. Recently I got a Zaurus PDA from eBay and needed to format an SD card as Ext2 so that I can install Linux on it. After a lot of searching I managed to find a guide on the Ubuntu forum to get the card reader working. But the guide was in French, so I am posting an English guide here.

First, determine what controller you have:

lspci | grep CardBus

If you see something like this:

06:07.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx21/x515 Cardbus Controller

congratulations, you have the same controller as I do, and the following procedure might work for you.

Create the file /etc/init.d/tifm with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
NAME=tifm
DESC="Texas Instrument Integrated Flash media controller"

# use lsb-base
. /lib/lsb/init-functions

retval=0
case "$1" in
    start)
        sync
        modprobe tifm_core
        modprobe tifm_7xx1
        modprobe tifm_sd
        log_end_msg $retval;
    ;;
    stop)
        modprobe -r tifm_sd
        modprobe -r tifm_7xx1
        modprobe -r tifm_core
        log_end_msg $retval
    ;;
    *)
        N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
        echo "Usage: $N {start|stop}" >&2
        retval=2
    ;;
esac

exit $retval

Make it executable and start at boot time:

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/tifm
sudo update-rc.d tifm defaults

To try it right away:

sudo /etc/init.d/tifm start

Plug in a card and it should be auto-mounted.