Unlocking your screen, Logging Out and In in your Ubuntu with Finger Prints....

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.