Belgian eID on Ubuntu 13.10

Posted by nvcleemp on June 4, 2014 · Leave a Comment 

As I explained in Getting Saucy, I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10. I wasn’t successful in using my eID on Ubuntu 13.04. Time to try if I can get it to work.

The type of my smart card reader is ACR38U. I installed the drivers from the website of ACS, I followed the instructions on the eID website to install the eID software and the eID viewer. I plugged the smart card reader in the USB port and ran the eID Viewer program. It however showed the message ‘Please connect a smart card reader’.

First let’s see if the device is detected. I started a terminal and ran lsusb. It indeed found the reader:

nvcleemp@superman:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 072f:9000 Advanced Card Systems, Ltd ACR38 AC1038-based Smart Card Reader

Checking whether the pcscd daemon was running also gave a positive result:

nvcleemp@superman:~$ ps -e | grep pcscd
926 ?        00:00:00 pcscd

So this was not the problem. Next I inserted my eID and ran pcsc_scan. This detected my eID, so up to here everything was fine.

I turned on logging in the eID viewer and restarted. Looking through the log I noticed the following lines:

[libj2pcsc.so workaround] Workaround for developer-only libj2pcsc.so on GNU/Linux Platforms enabled..
[libj2pcsc.so workaround] failed to find pcsclite.

A quick Google search, brought me to this page. I had already installed all the necessary libraries mentioned there, so I immediately skipped to the end of the suggested workaround:

nvcleemp@superman:~$ locate libpcsclite.so.1
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpcsclite.so.1
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpcsclite.so.1.0.0

I then added this location to the library path, and no I no longer got the error message in the eID viewer, and was able to successfully read my eID:

export DISPLAY=:0.0 && java -Djava.library.path=/lib/i386-linux-gnu \
-cp /usr/share/eid-viewer/eid-viewer.jar be.fedict.eidviewer.gui.BelgianEidViewer

Filed under computer, ubuntu