Just got another shipment from Deal Extreme. This time a USB Smart Card Reader. It's for reading my soon to arrive Free Software Foundation Europe fellowship card. However, all I had to try out with so far were old redundant bank cards. And that seemed to work without problems.

The reader came with a cute mini-CD with Linux drivers, but they were not required to get it running. Following the page at FSFE, the reader was up in minutes. Confirm that these two are installed; in my case they were:

yum install libusb pcsc-lite

Add the udev rules and group as indicated by the FSF howto, and restart X if necessary.

I also installed yum installed pcsc-tools, and could detect cards by running

pscs_scan