Saturday, October 13, 2012

sd card reader on lenovo e430

This may no longer work with the new 3.5 kernel or 12.1 ubuntu... see UPDATE: below.
-----
So my sd card reader wasn't working out of the box with my Lenovo e430 and Ubuntu (currently 12.04 Precise). I googled a bit and found this blog post, which finds out the device name using lspci (RealTek 5229), references this archwiki article on the Lenovo E430, which gets you to this driver page on the RealTek website, so that finally you can extract the drivers and run (corrected type in the final line of the original blog post:
$make
$sudo make install
$sudo depmod
$sudo modprobe rts5229
And it works! You shouldn't need to reboot, mine worked straight away after modprobe.

UPDATE:
This just stopped working (maybe because of kernel upgrade? I'm now on the 3.5 kernel, 12.10 Quantal), modprobe retuning this error:
FATAL: Module rts5229 not found.
I found this thread, where a user had had the same problem, and they linked to a ppa for lenovo fixes! I added it to my software sources, sudo apt-get update and then sudo apt-get install rts-5229-dkms. It still didn't work when I plugged it in, but sudo modprobe rts5229 worked straight away.So in short:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jamesf/lenovofixessudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install rts-5229-dkmssudo modprobe rts5229
should solve this problem, at this time...