# Card readers KAAN Standard Plus/xyz no longer supported

## dirk_salewski

Hello NG, 

Kobil stopped supporting their Card Readers KAAN Standard Plus / Advanced / Pro with Kernel 2.6.22 and later.  This information comes from the support of a home banking software company. There's also a discussion on that matter on the linux kernel mailing list.

I used to use one of these (sort of beautiful) devices for securing my homebanking transactions via HBCI (de), which means I have to upgrade now. Since I hate this "we want to earn more money, so we just kill all our devices older than 2M"-approach, I'll probably go with the models from direct competitor Reiner SCT. 

Greetings, 

Dirk

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## vmk

I wrote to kobil.de and asked, why my Kobil Kaan Standard Plus USB doesn't work with a current kernel. The answer was: There is a patch for SuSE and Ubuntu...  :Sad: 

openSUSE provides patched kernels, you can also get the patch alone. Ubuntu has the patch too. Why not gentoo?

openSUSE: http://de.opensuse.org/Benutzer:Fseidel/kobilkernel (warning: german!)

Patch for linux-2.6.22.9-0.4: http://linux.f-seidel.de/kobil/kobil_sct_update.patch

Ubuntu 7.1 instructions: http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Baustelle/kobil%20sct (warning: more german!  :Smile:  )

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## dirk_salewski

Well, I read that kernel mailing list, and somewhere deep inside somebody said that to make the driver work with KAAN Standard Plus again it had to be changed in a non-desireable way, doing things that a driver wasn't supposed to do. This was, as far as I recall, due to the device itself being buggy somehow. 

In addition to that I remember having poked around for a while with several "libct_something" versions from Kobil, which didn't work since they were not made for amd64 (happens to be my platform), and which, according to the documentation, will never support KAAN Standard Plus on amd64. So they broke the userspace part, too. 

I don't understand enough of these things, but it seems to me that the Kernel developers will never patch that driver again. And this means that you will have to hope that the provider of the patch refines it with every new kernel (or go and learn C). Maybe he does, and imho it is really cool that you found a way to make these devices operate again. Think e.g. of users who can't afford a new device. If I had discovered this possibility I might have given it another try and maybe still use it. Nevertheless I'll recommend the devices from ReinerSCT from now on, because of the really active linux support. And the model I have now operates WAY faster than the Kobil device. 

Greetings,

Dirk

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## dirk_salewski

 *vmk wrote:*   

> openSUSE provides patched kernels, you can also get the patch alone. Ubuntu has the patch too. Why not gentoo?

 

Probably because this is pretty much a "paranoid germans with hbci-banking using non-mainstream linux distros"-problem. Together no 5% of total population. Maybe Kobil told SuSE and Ubuntu about the patch, since those two together make up for most of the german linux market. 

You, on the other hand, know what a patch is (ask a standard Ubuntu user about that - he/she'll probably answer "repair kit for clothes" or something). @gentoo you can decide whether you want to operate your driver in a nonstandard way (supposing the above mentioned developer on lkml said the truth). 

Dirk

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