SD Memory Card Slot

Installing the SD Memory Card Slot driver for SUSE Linux on the HP TC4400
Once I knew I had an SD Memory Card slot on the laptop, I definitely wanted it to work. Both my phone and my pda use these cards so it would be a convenience.

It turned out to be pretty easy. Sean Russell pointed me to an open source driver for the TI FlashMedia family of memory devices.

It built and installed without error. There are only two minor points to look out for:

  1. When you unpack the source directory don’t put it into a folder with a fancy name (e.g. a name with blanks or punctuation in it). The Makefile instructions aren’t prepared for that.
  2. My experience was that only two of the three modules were loaded automatically. the tifm_sd.ko was not loaded. You can load it manually with the command (as root) “modprobe tifm_sd” or you can arrange for it to be loaded by creating a file called “tifm_7xx1″, putting this single line in it the file:

    install tifm_7xx1 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install tifm_7xx1 $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe tifm_sd ; : ; }

    and placing the file in the directory /etc/modprobe.dWhen this works the system notices whenever you pop an SD memory card into the slot and treats it properly.