Ricoh drivers

dsp · n00b Joined: 02 Mar 2009 Posts: 5

Hello all,

I write about problems with the Ricoh drivers. The main problem is that the "Ricoh controller" manages a lot of things.

After a lspci command i have :

MotivatedTea · Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 10:02 pm Post subject:

Ricoh has probably just re-branded some other generic components. Run "lspci -v" and look for the device numbers after "Subsystem: Device" for those device. Then google for those device numbers to figure out who actually made the chipsets for the devices.

You listed three Ricoh controllers: card reader, CardBus, and Firewire. You said that the card reader does work, which leaves only the CardBus and Firewire busses. Have you tried the generic drivers for those? The "Yenta-compatible" CardBus driver and the "OHCI1394" FireWire driver work with about 90% of all CardBus and FireWire adapters, respectively. I don't have a lot of experience with FireWire, but the last time I tried it, the "New FireWire stack" didn't work at all for me. I had to stick with the "Stable FireWire stack".

By the way, how do you know that the other devices aren't working? Neither the cardbus nor the firewire is going to show up in lsusb output. Have you tried plugging in devices to see if they're recognized?

dsp · n00b Joined: 02 Mar 2009 Posts: 5

I have this kind of message after "lspci -v" command:

MotivatedTea · Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 7:59 pm Post subject:

Sorry, I meant to say "lspvi -v -n". The "-n" gives numerical values. You'll get two hexadecimal numbers separated by a colon.

Camera
I just noticed you have "05ca:183a" on your lsusb output. The PCI numbers will look similar. After googling for "05ca:183a", it looks to me like your webcam is probably supported by the UVC family of webcam drivers. Unfortunately, based on most of the messages on the first page of google results, it also looks like other people are having problems getting it to work properly. That should give you a starting point, though.

Card Reader
I know that Ricoh does make their own card readers. I also know that they weren't very nice about giving any information on them to open-source developers, so for the longest time, Ricoh card readers didn't work under linux, period. End of story. Finally, someone managed to reverse-engineer some them and started writing drivers. There are now Ricoh card reader drivers in the kernel, so check your kernel configuration for those. (Hint: if you are configuring your kernel with "make menuconfig", then you can press forward-slash (/) to search for keywords.) If your laptop is very new, it's possible your model isn't supported yet. (The laptop I was using has since died, so I haven't had to deal with Ricoh drivers in a few years.) I don't have the same hardware as you, so it's hard for me to troubleshoot. However, it looks like your card reader is a Ricoh model R5C592. There's a thread in the Ubuntu support forum with a supposed fix. (It uses the "setpci" program, which is in sys-apps/pciutils.) Try that out, and look for similar threads online.

In General
Find the numeric ID's of your other devices and google those. That's how I generally figure out what drivers I need under Linux if it's not otherwise obvious. For instance, a while back I had a "Ricoh High Definition Audio" card which was actually an "Intel" HDA card and used Intel drivers. It's unfortunate that you have so much Ricoh hardware. Ricoh seems to me to be a very unfriendly company towards Linux.

dsp · n00b Joined: 02 Mar 2009 Posts: 5

So, i have this:

dsp · n00b Joined: 02 Mar 2009 Posts: 5

Card Reader
I try this forum solution but nothing works on my PC.

I don't find any thing in the web for this kind of issue. So, i try to look for...

MotivatedTea · Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:09 am Post subject:

I found another Ubuntu thread in which someone with a Sony TT laptop says they have most things working with the latest version of the Ubuntu (Karmic). See here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?s=1e7e159dc4e6f486af09837fbd6e3f75&t=1111753
That's not identical to your laptop, but the card reader seems to be the same version. "Karmic" is currently Ubuntu's testing branch, so there's no LiveCD for it. You could try burning the latest Ubuntu LiveCD and booting from that. If your card reader works with it, try to figure out what kernel version it's using and which modules it has loaded, and then see if you can do the same under Linux. It looks like the kernel being used by Karmic is currently 2.6.31, which is in portage but is keyworded. You could perhaps try using that kernel to see if the drivers in it are more up-to-date. One of the posts in that thread (post #77) looks like two modules are in use: sdhci and sdhci_pci. Make sure you are compiling both of those modules. Note that these appear to be generic SDHCI drivers; not Ricoh-specific.

I looked a little more for bugs in other distributions relating to the "Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 11)". It looks like some people have started getting it working as of the 2.6.29 kernel, but for SD cards only. As best I can tell, it's a 5-in-1 card reader, but only SD card Linux drivers have been written for it, and only recently.

There is an unresolved Linux kernel bug about the fact that MMC cards aren't yet supported here:
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14083
You might want to monitor that bug from time to time. However, that is just for the MMC support. Officially, SD support should be available for your card reader with the sdhci and sdhci_pci modules.