How to enable the integrated fingerprint reader

From ThinkWiki
Revision as of 16:56, 5 August 2011 by Jdthood (Talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search

Ways to enable the integrated fingerprint reader on ThinkPads:

fprint

For some time various projects provided support for various readers. That work mostly been unified under the fprint library, and thus libfprint and libpam-fprint (which provides authentication via PAM) are the best way to go, and in the meantime included by default in most Linux distributions. However, it seems that lately this project has stalled, and no support for newer chips has emerged for some time.

Thinkfinger

Alternatively, the original Thinkfinger project is at http://thinkfinger.sourceforge.net. It only provides support for the 1st generation reader, and has not been updated since 2007; see the How to enable the integrated fingerprint reader with ThinkFinger for detailed instructions. It is also in Debian Lenny. This integrates seamlessly with PAM and doesn't produce a tacky graphical prompt.

Hint:
If you've followed the instructions and "tf-tool --verify" works, but nothing else does, make sure that the "uinput" module is loaded.

Fingerprint GUI

Feb 2011: The following works as smoothly on Ubuntu and T410s: https://launchpad.net/~fingerprint/+archive/fingerprint-gui