Hardware support in Ubuntu has come a long way but there are still pieces of hardware that, for one reason or another, require a bit of effort to get up and running..
One challenge set to me after installing Ubuntu 10.10 on my netbook was getting the card reader up and running; Fringe Season 3 won’t watch itself!
Thankfully the ‘fix’ came easy, so a few minutes spent Googling and a handful of forum threads later all was all fixed and Fauxliva Dunham was kicking-ass on my screen.
To save you the same hassle, here’s how to do it.
Fixing SD card reader on HP Mini 110 and other netbooks
This guide will walk owners of HP Mini 110 series and Compaq Mini CQ10-500 series netbook owners – along with any one else owning a device using a Realtek rts5159 card reader – through downloading and installing the required driver.
To identify your card reader model run ‘lsusb’ in a Terminal.
Download the ‘Unix (Linux)’ driver for the Realtek rts5159 from this link.
Once downloaded extract, moving the folder to your ‘Home’ folder.
Open a new terminal session
Now we need to install the driver. Run each of the following commands deparately, allowing each to complete before moving on to the next.
cd rts_pstor
make
sudo make install
sudo depmod
Once completed reboot computer and the card reader will be working