I recently purchased a ESTK.me eSIM Card Reader “RED” but when trying to connect to it from my Linux Box, i got the following error:

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SCardEstablishContext() failed: 8010001D
APDU driver init failed

After a bit of research i found the solution here . The error indicates that PCSC service is not running. For linux, it’s pcscd service.

Start pcscd on systemd based distribution: sudo systemctl start pcscd. If you receive the error:

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Failed to start pcscd.service: Unit pcscd.service not found.

then you have to install pcscd, e.g. under Ubuntu via sudo apt install pcscd.

For complete explanation list of PCSC error codes, see pcsc-lite: ErrorCodes