Touch-ID like experience on Linux Mint

2 min readSep 6, 2022

The fprint project aims to plug a gap in the Linux desktop: support for consumer fingerprint reader devices.
Previously, Linux support for such devices has been scattered amongst different projects (many incomplete) and inconsistent in that application developers would have to implement support for each type of fingerprint reader separately. For more information on where we came from, see ?/Project history.
We’re trying to change that by providing a central system to support all the fingerprint readers we can get our hands on. The software is open source and in the long term we’re shooting for adoption by distributions, integration into common desktop environments, etc.

Prerequisites

Install required packages

$ apt update
$ apt install fprintd libpam-fprintd

Configuration

Edit the below listed pam.d configurations.

$ vim /etc/pam.d/{common-auth,lightdm,login,polkit-1,su,sudo}

And add the following line above every other auth section.

# Manually added <date>
auth      sufficient pam_fprintd.so

Enroll your fingers

You can either use the following to just add your right index finger:

$ fprintd-enroll

or both hands with all fingers

$ for finger in {left,right}-{thumb,{index,middle,ring,little}-finger}; do fprintd-enroll -f "$finger" "$USER"; done

Verify

You can check if your fingerprints are created if you find something below the following path:

$ ls -lsah /var/lib/fprint/

Test

Open a new terminal/terminal window and type, if you see the following output you’re able to use fprintd anf fingerprints.

$ sudo -s
Place your right index finger on the fingerprint reader

Troubleshooting

Follow the logs to check if there are errors

$ journalctl -u fprintd -f