Ubuntu Linux and the ACS ACR38DT DualKey smart card reader

Recently I bought the ACS ACR38DT DualKey smart card reader (ID 072f:90cc Advanced Card Systems, Ltd ACR38 SmartCard Reader).
Since I work only on a Linux box, I needed a support driver for this device.
The PC/SC light project offers a CCID common driver that works with this device – the libccid package on Ubuntu.
But my problem was that I also have a OMNIKEY CardMan 6121 smart card reader that refuses to work properly with the PC/SC CCID driver, so i needed the official driver supplied by HID Global (see the Download link on the product page). Ubuntu offers an official driver for CardMan 6121 – pcsc-omnikey package. Unfortunately this package conflicts with the libccid package and the last cannot be installed together with the pcsc-omnikey. Another problem of the CardMan 6121 is that the pcsc-omnikey package is outdated, so i needed to download and prepare a new package for Ubuntu with the updated official driver version. It is now in my Ubuntu PPA repository for all those that will need it.

So in order to use my ACS ACR38DT DualKey smart card reader with the native PC/SC CCID driver i needed to remove the pcsc-omnikey package… I.e. I had to chose between using one of my readers at a time… A situation that was unacceptable for me…

I solved this problem by downloading the Linux driver from Advanced Card Systems and preparing a new CCID ACR package. BTW Ubuntu has a non-CCID driver package in the repositories and it’s named libacr38u. Sadly it does not support the listed smart card reader above.
So the new prepared package named: pcsc-acsccid, is ready and in my PPA repository. The difference from PC/SC native CCID driver is that it is standalone and does not need any additional packages except the official pcscd package from Ubuntu’s repos…
It works ok and that solved my two card readers problem…

So now I can use both my smart card reader devices (the OMNIKEY CardMan 6121 and the ACS ACR38DT DualKey) at the same time. 🙂
If you have the same problem I hope my solution helps you.