Fingerprint readers, whether for legitimate security reasons or just as a nifty feature that lets you feel vaguely James Bond-ish, have checkered support under Linux. However there is always a solution.
While not a crucial feature (nor one that I was missing) of my laptop, I was still slightly annoyed with how my fingerprint reader held out on me, as the only hardware feature of my laptop that wasn’t working out-of-the-box.
However, in this lovely community of ours there is never a doubt that there exist folks with similar problems who have taken it upon themselves to fix them.
So through a bit of web searching, I came across a PPA for Ubuntu with the latest libraries but also containing a nifty user interface for managing your device and enrolling fingerprints.
The fingerprint enrolling interface
Installing Fingerprint GUI in Ubuntu
To get support for fingerprint-based authentication in Ubuntu as well as the related GUI, you need only add the following PPA and install a few packages.
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:fingerprint/fingerprint-gui && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libbsapi policykit-1-fingerprint-gui fingerprint-gui
*It ought to be noted that the related PolicyKit package for the fingerprint stack will remove the default one (“policykit-gnome” , etc. depending on your environment) thus if you do decide to remove the fingerprint PPA, you must reinstall this package manually, or risk a broken system.
In order for the new defaults to take effect you’ll need to run the GUI and enroll a few fingers, then restart the session by logging out and back in.
Now you can have fun unlocking your screen, logging out and in, sudo-ing and running things with root privileges, using your fingerprints (or toeprints, should you choose to register one) –of course you can still use your password.
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