Fprint

From the fprint homepage:

The fprint project aims to plug a gap in the Linux desktop: support for consumer fingerprint reader devices.

The idea is to use the built-in fingerprint reader in some notebooks for login using PAM. This article will also explain how to use regular password for backup login method (solely fingerprint scanner is not recommended due to numerous reasons).

Prerequisites

Make sure you have one of the supported finger scanners. You can check if your device is supported by checking this list of supported devices. To check which one you have, type

# lsusb

Installation

Install fprintd from the official repositories. imagemagick might also be needed.

Configuration

Login configuration

Note: If you use GDM, the fingerprint-option is already available in the login menu. You can skip this section!

Add pam_fprintd.so as sufficient to the top of the auth section of /etc/pam.d/system-local-login:

/etc/pam.d/system-local-login

auth      sufficient pam_fprintd.so
auth      include   system-login
...

This tries to use fingerprint login first, and if if fails or if it finds no fingerprint signatures in the give user's home directory, it proceeds to password login.

You can also modify other files in /etc/pam.d/ in the same way, for example /etc/pam.d/polkit-1 for GNOME polkit authentication.

Create fingeprint signature

To add a signature for a finger, run

$ fprintd-enroll

You will be asked to scan the given finger. After that, the signature is created in /var/lib/fprint/.

For more information, see man fprintd.

Setup fingerprint-gui

An alternate fingerprint reader gui. This works with libfprint-unstable which has support for the new Upeksonly readers, such as, the new Thinkpad W510 T510 T410 T420 Upeksonly reader with USB ID 147e:2016

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Integrated_Fingerprint_Reader

http://www.n-view.net/Appliance/fingerprint/

Install as dependency libfakekey and fingerprint-gui.

Please make sure your user is a member of "plugdev" and "scanner" group if you use UPEK non-free library. You may also have to log out and back in for these changes to take effect.

# gpasswd -a USER plugdev
# gpasswd -a USER scanner

fingerprint-polkit-agent conflicts with files in /etc/xdg/autostart that must be removed:

"polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1.desktop" and
"polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1.desktop".

Edit your PAM configuration (e.g., /etc/pam.d/{login,su,sudo,gdm}).

Change the auth section to read:

auth       required pam_env.so
auth       sufficient   pam_fingerprint-gui.so
auth       sufficient   pam_unix.so try_first_pass likeauth nullok
auth       required pam_deny.so

Add this to your ~/.bashrc file if you get an error saying that it can't connect to X desktop (see this for more details).

xhost + >/dev/null

Now run fingerprint-gui and register fingerprints for the current user. You will need to run fingerprint-gui and register fingerprints as all users you want to use the fingerprint reader, i.e. as root to use it for "su" login.