On a whim I bought a cheap "6-in-1" USB flash card reader (the maker's
web site is www.pqiusa.com). I managed to get it to work on my
Mandrake 9.0 laptop, but it was a bit tricky.
The first problem is that that 2.4.19 kernel in 9.0 doesn't seem to
recognize that this device is actually four different devices, one for
each of the card slots (the "6-in-1" is a slight exaggeration; a couple
of the card types share slots). On my parents' totally stock 9.0
desktop machine, only the first card slot was configured automatically
as device sda; the rest were ignored. I didn't have time to find
a fix for this.
I didn't have this problem on my laptop running 9.0, perhaps because
I'm using the 2.4.20 kernel from kernel.org, with devfs disabled.
There may have been some changes in the usb storage drivers, but I
didn't track them down. I'm just happy the thing works. In
/var/log/messages I can see each of the four devices being configured
as sda through sdd.
The second problem is that the ide-storage module isn't getting
removed when the device is unplugged. So if the device is plugged in
again, it gets treated as a new SCSI host (scsi1) instead of scsi0,
and the four slots get configured as devices sde through sdh. The
only workaround I could find was to 'rmmod usb-storage' after
unplugging the device. To do this automatically, I made the following
ugly hack to /etc/hotplug/usb.agent:
*** usb.agent.orig 2002-04-01 13:51:32.000000000 -0800
--- usb.agent 2003-01-12 18:00:18.000000000 -0800
***************
*** 323,328 ****
--- 323,331 ----
esac
if [ "$DRIVERS" != "" ]; then
FOUND=true
+ echo "#!/bin/sh" >$REMOVER
+ echo "rmmod $DRIVERS" >>$REMOVER
+ chmod +x $REMOVER
fi
# cope with special driver module configurations
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