SD/MMC ricoh drivers

[nightfrost]

Hi,

I've just ordered a laptop which should arrive in a few days and I'm dying to get gentoo running on it. During this painful wait of a few days, I've been basically hunting down everything linux-related about that model. One rather bothering thing is its use of a ricoh SD/MMC card reader. According to what I've managed to gather, there is no driver for that card reader to work under linux. What's more troublesome, is the occasional suggestion I've come across that SD/MMC drivers will never be available in open source due to various patent issues. I find that strange, however, since there are Winbond (I think it's winbond at least) drivers for SD/MMC in kernel 2.6.10+. But allegedly, these don't work with ricoh.

Anyway, I know that many laptop systems actually use the ricoh card reader, but there's nothing about those card readers mentioned in the forums here. So I thought I'd start this thread to see what's going on. Does anyone know anything about any reverse-engineered drivers, or wrapper, or anything at all that's going? is there any hope for the near future?

Cheers

[gapon]

hi, i have umax visionbook 935 and i think that it has ricoh card reader too... no success to get it working :/

[nightfrost]

No success here either. But I must say I'm surprised that there's so little talk about it. I think the ricoh card reader is somewhat common amongst laptop owners, so I don't understand why there's not more fuzz about possible drivers...