By now, I'm running GnuPG 2.0.17 on Gentoo. The card reader completely stopped
working after upgrading to pcsc-lite 1.6.6. I tried to install GnuPG without the
pcsc-lite USE flag, but this didn't change anything either.
If somebody wants to work on the problem and needs a reader for that, I'm
willing to send it by snail mail.

I have meanwhile switched to Gentoo on my notebook and tried again. The problem
still exists in 2.0.16. At first, the reader didn't work at all without pcscd,
but when I edited the source code so cherry_mode is not being set to 1, I could
at least use the reader again. The keypad is still being ignored though.

That was of course the first thing I checked. I have a udev rule that sets the
permissions. It doesn't work as root either. I also tried to install some
(proprietary, I think, but there was no licence file) Cherry driver from their
website, but this didn't change anything either.

I tried to set cherry_mode to 0 and build GnuPG including gpg-agent and
scdaemon, but I couldn't get it to work nonetheless. Any further ideas?

I now tried to disable pcscd and run scdaemon with the debug-ccid-driver option.
It seems scdaemon simply does not find the reader without pcscd:

The card is version 2.0. The USB device ID of the reader (it's not a keyboard,
but only a reader with keypad) is 046a:003e ("Cherry GmbH SmartTerminal
ST-2xxx"). I tried to run gpg --card-status without pcscd running, but then I
got this error: gpg: selecting openpgp failed: ec=6.108