Factory is the latest, greates from SuSE. This is what someday will be the next version of opensuse. Now, factory had as of 25.10.2006 a kernel with version 2.6.18. Check out my "uname -a" output.

Linux toshiba 2.6.18.1-6-default #1 SMP Wed Oct 18 15:16:29 UTC 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

How did I do it? I just downloaded two files from the Factory repository: kernel-default and irbalancer. Then I installed them using "rpm -i kernel-default* irbalancer*".

Reboot and you are set with a brand new kernel that has sdhci working out of the box. But still no SD-Card… don't worry, just login as root and type "modprobe mmc_block" and you are set to mount any compatible SD-Card. I do this using the "system:/media" KDE kio-slave.

Update 27.10.2006

The driver works. But, with both my SD card (64MB and 1Gig) copying larger files to the cards works less than good. It allways starts well, but after a few megabytes it stalls and needs at least a few seconds to continue. For my needs this is not a show stoper, but it might be for you.

Update 14.12.2006 

This laptop now has openSuSE 10.2 on it. The SD card works flawlessly, KDE mounts any card right away. The above error might be tracable to a bad SD card and not as I had asumed bad driver.

I have the luck of having to use a Toshiba Tecra M3. Its a quiet good laptop, but some hardware never wanted to work well under linux. The SD-Card slot was one of them. The kernel that comes with SuSE 10.1 does not have the apropriate driver (module) to work with the Texas Instrument chipset that Toshiba build into this laptop as the driver was not available when 10.1 was released. One way to fix this issue would be to download the patches for sdhci that are available scattered arround the internet and then compile the kernel for yourself. I am not that fond of doing that, so I came up with a different way of updateing the whole kernel: opensuse Factory.