I bought a touchatag ages ago, but couldn't get it installed properly under linux (and when I got it working under Windows the supplied software required that I create an account, which I really dislike). It's no longer available to purchase (except perhaps through resellers with old stock), but it is a RFID-tag reader (that came with a few RFID-tags) and was part of the 'Internet-of-Things' effort. Although anyone I know who has one didn't get it for that reason. It lay gathering dust in the back of my mind until I suddenly had a project idea. But first, I had to get the darned thing to work!

Here's how I went about it under Fedora 18.

Pre-requisites (you probably don't need all these, but I have ambitions);
yum install pcsc-*
yum install libusb libusb-devel
yum install libnfc*


Install the driver;
wget http://www.acs.com.hk/drivers/eng/ACR122_Driver_Lnx_Mac10.5_10.6_10.7_104_P.zip
unzip ACR122_Driver_Lnx_Mac10.5_10.6_10.7_104_P.zip
cd ACR122_Driver_Lnx_Mac10.5_10.6_10.7_104_P/
tar -jxvf acsccid-1.0.4.tar.bz2
cd acsccid-1.0.4/
./configure
make


Check it's working;
lsusb
Lists it as Advanced Card Systems, Ltd.

nfc-list
It should list your reader, if not, try pcsc_scan, if still no luck run pcscd -f.
If at this point it's complaining that your firmware is bogus you need to edit the config file to skip the version checking, for me the file path is;
vim /usr/lib64/pcsc/drivers/ifd-ccid.bundle/Contents/Info.plist

Locate "ifdDriverOptions" and turn the "0x0000" value into 0x0005 (0x0004 might work too). Save and exit, then restart the daemon. I had trouble getting it back up again, so I rebooted.

Run the checks again to see that it is now picking up the device properly.

Use it;
This varies greatly depending on what you want to do. One of the alternatives recommended on the touchatag site is iotope. I downloaded it (to run in standalone node mode), unzipped, and ran the bash script provided (it's Java based). Then you open a browser and go to http://localhost:4242/ui/. Then simply put a RFID-tag in the reader and (if compatible) see the details show up.


I pieced together this information from two sources;
1. An archlinux wiki page which suggests another application, and
2. A backtrack linux page that suggests an entirely different application and use.

This is probably old-hat to those of you it interests, but I've finally gotten it to work, so I'm putting it here against my forgetting in future.

Fedora 15 upgrade

2011-Jun-25, Saturday 07:48 pm
I seem to only upgrade in the Summer, you know, not in the middle of term. First OS on this netbook was Fedora 11. Then Fedora 13, which after trying a few things I had to install from the full DVD (I have an odd wireless chipset). Then, recently I upgraded from 13, to 15, inside Fedora. It seemed to go well at first... until it lost my wireless card. This and that kept messing up and to be completely honest, I'm holding a grudge against Gnome 3 for being different, but I'm slowing coming around. So, to hell with it all, said I. Backed up my data, then burned a copy of the full installation DVD again, plugged in the external DVD-drive, and let rip. It took hours and hours to get it back to where I was (repos, specific programs, old data I still needed, etc). But it all went surprisingly smoothly. Only one hiccup was with VirtualBox. Basically, it was installing, but not properly, so I couldn't actually run any VMs. The error, and various solutions are described here. What worked for me boiled down to;
yum groupinstall "Development Tools" (It wouldn't let me choose multiple profiles at install time so I choose Graphical Desktop)

yum install dkms
yum install kernel-PAE-devel
And then;
/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

The future is pretty. And now, to make sure every thing else works *crosses fingers*
Success! I have wireless on my EEE 1000H with Fedora 13. Turns out the included drivers are broken, and I was attempting to download the wrong one. What you need is RPMfusion repo, and to install the "metapackage", in my case for the PAE-kernel. It's posted about here: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1366050
(The install from the full installation DVD went perfectly!)

Fedora 13 does appear to have drivers that work for my awkward wireless card (kmod-rt2860). I can see the available networks, and I can attempt to connect to them. But there is where it falls down. It isn't authenticating against the network, it just continually asks me for the passphrase. I've seen this behaviour before, on many different versions of Fedora, on many different laptops. But never for my home network before. For some reason NetworkManager just randomly decides not to like some networks. And different ones on different machines at that. The only thing they have in common is WPA security. The internet isn't yielding any useful information. I'm wondering if anyone here has come across this before? Can they point me towards a solution? Broken wireless on a netbook is grounds for changing distro.

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