Making Belgian eID work on Arch Linux

Here, I will put the steps that worked for me in order to be able to use the Belgian eID on Arch Linux.

At first, when I looked for documentation I found this useful post. Unfortunately, things did not work for me, so I had to go through the available documentation in the source code available here.

However, it was a lot easier than it seemed at the beginning. Detailed instructions are below:

0. Hardware

No additional steps had to be performed in order to make Arch Linux recognize the card reader (0bda:0165). With the current kernel version (3.12), the required driver is included.

1. Required packages

First of all, let's make the card reader work. Reading the available documentation, we have to execute the following commands:

• Install packages pcsclite, ccid and opensc.
  

  $ sudo pacman -S pcsclite ccid opensc
  

• Enable and start pcscd
  

  $ sudo systemctl enable pcscd
  $ sudo systemctl start pcscd
  

• Configure Firefox
  Navigate to Edit -> Preference -> Advanced -> Certificates -> Security Devices and load a module using /usr/lib/opensc-pkcs11.so

2. Install middleware and viewer

Fortunately, there are available packages from AUR.

• eid-mw
• eid-viewer

One should be able to use the eid-viewer and be able to see the information contained in the identity card.

3. Test it

At this point, the installation is complete. If one wants to use the official test application, one must go to this site and perform the test.